In the middle of my workout and all I can focus on is this treadmill display's terrible UI... Looks like a zoom button but actually increases the speed.

You know you're a front-end dev when...

Manager: This code you wrote violates the single responsibility principle!!

Dev: How so?

Manager: You have one function that you call in *MULTIPLE* places. That’s too much responsibility for one function! Functions should only have one responsibility!! Creeping the scope of a function beyond that is a TERRIBLE way to write code!

Dev: But why spin up multiple functions that all perform the same thing?

Manager: Well if a function has a bug in it and you use that function multiple places then that bug exists everywhere you use that function. If a function only has one responsibility then if it has a bug that bug will only exist in the single place it is called! You really should think first before asking questions like that.

Dev: …

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

My first day in a Linux admin and security course. I went all confident and cocky waiting for some bullshit like "type in your term: ls, cd, pwd, see you tomorrow"
Suddenly the teacher starts to configure lampp, then jumps to bind, and thirty minutes leater , when everyone has their ssl keys under control, I was still struggling to correctly forward my mate. The rest of the day was smooth and easy for those who finished their servers, and there I was, unable to find my own ass in the middle of that mess made of bad assigned permissions and wrong placed addresses. Even worse, he came to me when I asked for help, took my chair and fixed everything in one beautiful single bash line. I started to ask "what's this? Where is that? Is it a config file or a directory?" And with all his patience he keep telling me the obvious answers that where right there at the screen but I couldn't see. Took me two weeks to catch his pace, and another two weeks to understand fully his classes. He never said a word about my terrible first day (first couple weeks). When course finished, I saw he was going to teach a really hard security module, and I signed up without hesitate.

User: We have been dealing with this bug for a month now! How come nobody has fixed it?

Dev: Who did notify about this issue?

User: You’re not listening we have been dealing with this for a MONTH!

Dev: When this issue first occurred did you tell anyone?

User: Yes!

Dev: Who?

User: …. Ok I don’t remember but I know I said something to someone. Anyway it doesn’t matter, your job is IT so how come this isn’t fixed?

Dev: Did you have an email? Ticket number? Teams message? Any record of where this was dropped?

User: I think you’re missing the point. We haven’t been able to do out jobs for A MONTH. We’ve just been sitting around completely helpless. We’ve been trying to figure a system using paper and pencil to replace the electronic one but it’s too complicated. How come this wasn’t fixed the second it happened?

Dev: It’s hard to respond to an issue if it’s not brought to out attention.

User: Ok but we are too busy to create a ticket! We have a million things to do and we can’t do any of them because your app doesn’t work! We’ve been sitting here telling each other how terrible this system is AND IT HAS BEEN A MONTH.

Dev: …. Yeah I got that

Linux user on a Windows machine: "ugh, this is terrible."
Windows user on a Linux machine: "I don't know what I'm doing."

A conversation with our network/system admin.

Me : Can I install linux on my computer, windows is slow and terrible.

Him : No, if you use anything but Windows in this company, you will be fired for bypassing our security protocols. Its written in your contract.

Me : *boots up my Macbook*

There was a previous developer who my managers has told us was terrible and toxic. Yet due to terrible planning, he had everyone work for over 13 hours last Sunday.

I contacted this previous developer to learn his side of the story and learned a lot. I realize between their two narratives is the truth, but I see all the ways we've been lied, the ways this other dev was scapegoated and all the additional work that's sure to come.

I refuse to work weekends again. I refuse to work over 40 hours. I wish I could convince everyone else to do the same. No amount of money is worth making up for bad planning and management.

Story time.

Not sure it counts as data loss, more temporary corruption (and in my own brain).

> be me.
> be clinically depressed
> be recently out of an awful breakup
> recently nearly committed suicide by train
> be bored and lonely one night
> take lsd
> feel fine
> go to McDonald’s
> feel fine
> while eating question the nature of reality
> become convinced I’m an observer of a cosmic story and cannot die
> go outside in only jeans
> run in traffic at 1AM to prove my point
> don’t die
> run around the streets more sure of my new reality than I’d ever been of anything
> feel free and no longer sad
> walk around observing the world
> sit on wall and wonder why the story had the structure I was observing
> fall off wall into grass and mud
> follow cute guy into apartment building
> follow into lift
> ask what everything means
> spend better part of couple hours in lift pressing emergency button asking for help
> get no response
> scare poor Russian lady that gets into lift and finds an overweight topless man on the floor babbling incoherently
> ride to top floor
> get out
> sit on leather chair in corridor
> feelsnice.tiff
> decide I’m actualising my desires and reality
> don’t realise this is just the trip wearing off and consciousness exerting more control
> walk into random apartment (door is unlocked because why wouldn’t it be for the god that I believe I am at this point)
> explore
> gorgeous apartment
> realise it’s a family apartment from clothes in hallway and items
> find bathroom
> decide I want a bubble bath
> run bubble bath
> can’t work out how to drain water. Bath now full of twigs and mud #sorry
> decide that I’d like to go home, or onto my next adventure. Hopefully the seaside as I’m now realising I have more control.
> open bathroom door
> not the seaside. Ah well. Try to walk home
> walk home wrapped in fluffy towel from nice family’s apartment
> get home
> realise what had happened
> throw remaining drugs away
> sit and rock in utter paranoia and guilt for hours until flatmate wakes up.

MFW first bad trip ever.
MFW I wonder whether that family knew I was there and were scared / discovered the mess in the bathroom the next morning and not knowing which is worse.

MFW I still have the towel because it’s fluffy AF.

The moral of the story kids, is that when it comes to the OS rattling around in your brain, installing a virus that is sensitive to what apps you have running is a bad idea when those apps make the virus go to fucking town.

Terrible analogy I know, but fuck it.

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).

I just hate npm dependencies.

If you want to write a small website with npm dependencies (some frontend deps like Bootstrap and some development deps like gulp or babel) you will have more npm dependencies in your project than own code. It is ridiculous, how some lazy developers just add dependencies to their projects, without evaluating their dependencies. The source code of one of my projects is around 4MB (without any dependencies). If you then run yarn as required, it grows to around 80MB (where 73MB are node_modules).

This is just terrible.

I rant about this, as I made the mistake to upload my node_modules directories when restoring a backup of my server. Worst idea one could ever have.

Today at lunch we were talking about the bathroom conditions. At some point I commented:

"I don't go to the one closest to my office, the WiFi reception is terrible there."

*dead silence*

I can't be the only one, right? (posting this from the bathroom, BTW)

Man, we have a snake in our company.

This snake is responsible for terrible code. They oversee a offshore team, but hold them to no coding practices. They don't do code reviews or checks. They let them be lazy and get away with sloppy work every time.

And if you critize their team - they will defend them and get angry at you. You can't adress the problem because said snake is always around. He's in a senior position for giving our company cheap workers, doing years of damage to our product while the non-code savvy managers remain blissfully unaware of their product being ruined in the background.

This snake is the senior product office. He has a share in the company now. He is from the overshore team's country. That team now has their claws so dug into our companies roots and are just pumping lsd's into it constantly. Feels good untill you die from an overdose.

Here I am, the new junior software developer, trying to tear out the claws that have sunk into these roots. Im up against the snake. The snake hates me. I hate the snake. I am trying to open the eyes of the managers. They hate that. They want to silence me so I don't expose the awful, unprofessional level of work they do.

Well, that's too bad. I won't back down from this, snake.

Them: Root, you take too long to get tickets out. You only have a few simple ones. You really need to rebuild your reputation.

Also them: Hey, could you revisit this ticket? Could you help ____ with this other ticket? Hey Root, how do you do this? Root, someone had a suggestion on one of your tickets; could you implement that by EoD? Hey Root, i didn't read your ticket notes; how do you test it? Hey, could you revisit this ticket for the fourth time and remove some whitespace? Hey Root, someone has non-blocking code review comments you need to address before we can release the ticket. Hey Root, we want to expand that ticket scope by 5-6 times; still labeled a trivial feature though.

Also them: Super easy ticket for you. Make sure you talk with teams A, B, C, D, E and get their input on the ticket, talk with ____ and ____ and ____ about it, find a solution that makes them all happy and solves the problem too, then be sure to demo it with everyone afterward. Super easy; shouldn't take you more than a couple days. Oh, and half of them are on vacation.

Also them: Hey, that high-priority ticket you finished months ago that we ignored? Yeah, you need to rewrite it by tomorrow. Also, you need to demo it with our guy in India, who's also on vacation. Yes, tomorrow is the last day. (The next day:) You rewrote it, but weren't able to schedule the demo? Now you've missed the release! It's even later! This reflects very poorly on you.

Also them: Perfect is the enemy of good; be more like the seniors who release partially-broken code quickly.

Also them: Here's an non-trivial extreme edgecase you might not have covered. Oh, it would have taken too much time and that's why you didn't do it? Jeez, how can you release such incomplete code?

Also them: Yeah, that ticket sat in code review for five months because we didn't know it was high-priority, despite you telling us. It's still kinda your fault, though.

Also them: You need to analyze traffic data to find patterns and figure out why this problem is happening. I know you pushed the fix for it 8 months ago, and I said it was really solid, but the code is too complex so I won't release it. Yeah I know it's just a debounce with status polling and retrying. Too complex for me to understand. Figure out what the problem is, see if another company has this same problem, and how they fixed it.

-------------

Yep. I'm so terrible for not getting these tickets out, like wow. Worst dev ever. Much shame.

LF work, PST.

I realize now I probably shouldn't have called out my manger's bullshit if I wanted to keep my job. We were told to work a Sunday and our PO called it a "Smack-a-thon."

I said, "No let's not use stupid names. Let's call things what they are. This is a management failure Sunday."

That was during new hire lunch, in front of my manager.

I worked the first Sunday. I refused to work the second one. I've also been refusing to work over 45 hours a week.

So I guess I could have seen it coming. My manager didn't even have the gums to do it himself. He had the HR lady do it, while I was working remote from home. She told me it wasn't a 9 to 5 shop and that people there are expected to work long hours (People on my team are working 80+ a week for several months).

I took the train in to get my stuff. No one was there. My computer already gone. Couldn't even say "Go fuck yourself to anybody."

So I feel better now. I haven't taken a day of since I started in February, so it's time for some vacation and an unemployment check.

It was a really terrible job, and terribly mismanaged. I'm glad I stood my ground and knew what I was worth. I wish my co-workers had done the same.

I should have tried to start a union.

PineScript is absolute garbage.

It's TradingView's scripting language. It works, but it's worse than any language I have ever seen for shoddy parsing. Its naming conventions are pretty terrible, too:

transparency? no, "transp"
sum? no, cum. seriously. cum(array) is its "cumulative sum."

There are other terrible names, but the parser is what really pisses me off.

1) If you break up a long line for readability (e.g. a chained ternary), each fragment needs to be indented by more than its parent... but never by a multiple of 4 spaces because then it isn't a fragment anymore, but its own statement.

2) line fragments also cannot end in comments because comments are considered to be separate lines.

3) Lambdas can only be global. They're just fancy function declarations. Someone really liked the "blah(x,y,z) =>" syntax

4) blocks to `if`s must be on separate lines, meaning `if (x) y:=z` is illegal. And no, there are no curly braces, only whitespace.

There are plenty more, but the one that really got me furious is:

98) You cannot call `plot()`, `plotshape()`, etc. if they're indented! So if you're using non-trivial logic to optionally plot things like indicators, fuck you.

Whoever wrote this language and/or parser needs to commit seppuku.

An entire night I've spent on this shit.. preparing wires, soldering them on the motherboard, and finally connecting everything up to current meters, my PC's USB port and a lithium cell from my old Doogee phone that I still had laying around. All in the hopes to get an adb shell. But all in vain.. the turd doesn't even want to boot up. What a fantastic waste of time 😑
(Apologies for the terrible picture quality btw, this tablet's camera is absolute garbage)

This is why places like CodeAcademy are terrible

So, there is this company (let's call it A) with an average idea, who got the android app and webservices from a company(B) . The service was awful but cheap. The owner of the A was a friend and gave my company the handover to manage the project. I actually ranted about that on wk11(The worst project). Now, The project was terrible. It took me months to give it any real structure, fix the services, make it compatible with iOS. Now, that majority of the work was done, suddenly we were too expensive and the work was being given to another company while much of our payment wasn't going to come(Friggin company politics). But, guess which company did the project now go to, it was 'B'.
After a couple of weeks I see, inline styles and js errors start emerging on the website.
Tell you what, if there's any justice in this world, he will one day come back to me and then I will respectfully tell him to fuck off!
Thank goodness there's devRant to just whine about this shit!

Merry Christmas everyone 🙂

This year I didn't prepare anything for it, and family won't be visited this year. I think it's better this way. My mother didn't piss on me when I was on fire - back when I was homeless and begged her to be allowed back in her home, she told me to deal with it on my own. She's been homeless herself and knows how terrible it is. I dealt with it. I hate my mother because of that, and visiting her was always an act, a formality.

Not anymore. Half a year ago I cut ties with her.. and honestly, it's for the best. I don't want to get hurt anymore by visiting the house that should've been a refuge but wasn't when I needed it most. And I got rid of it, in favor of my own stuff. And a family of my own, a community of fellow developers with whom I feel a far stronger bond than a family could ever be. You are my new family, my dearest friends. And unlike those blood bonds that make up a family unconditionally, you can bet your ass that you've very much deserved my respect.

Merry Christmas.. unlike with my biological family, I've found refuge in devRant and its community every time I needed it most. Seriously, I can't thank you enough for that. I love you all.. thank you for being my precious family! ♥️

Why is it formatted like this? Cant they just do a \n on a capital Letter? This looks so terrible😢

No, I didn't. Also, beside the point but only guys on that team apart from me.

Why is this such a fucking pressing issue right now? I feel terrible that because of my presence everyone now thinks they have to mind their language. I say 'guys', I will say 'guys', I will be called 'guys' and will always oppose this bullshit agenda of coming up with problems where they don't exist.

In my world suppressing your natural speech is a form of censorship. And where there is censorship there is me in rage, rage FUCKING RAGE!

This codebase reminds me of a large, rotting, barely-alive dromedary. Parts of it function quite well, but large swaths of it are necrotic, foul-smelling, and even rotted away. Were it healthy, it would still exude a terrible stench, and its temperament would easily match: If you managed to get near enough, it would spit and try to bite you.

Swaths of code are commented out -- entire classes simply don't exist anymore, and the ghosts of several-year-old methods still linger. Despite this, large and deprecated (yet uncommented) sections of the application depend on those undefined classes/methods. Navigating the codebase is akin to walking through a minefield: if you reference the wrong method on the wrong object... fatal exception. And being very new to this project, I have no idea what's live and what isn't.

The naming scheme doesn't help, either: it's impossible to know what's still functional without asking because nothing's marked. Instead, I've been working backwards from multiple points to try to find code paths between objects/events. I'm rarely successful.

Not only can I not tell what's live code and what's interactive death, the code itself is messy and awful. Don't get me wrong: it's solid. There's virtually no way to break it. But trying to understand it ... I feel like I'm looking at a huge, sprawling MC Escher landscape through a microscope. (No exaggeration: a magnifying glass would show a larger view that included paradoxes / dubious structures, and these are not readily apparent to me.)

It's also rife with bad practices. Terrible naming choices consisting of arbitrarily-placed acronyms, bad word choices, and simply inconsistent naming (hash vs hsh vs hs vs h). The indentation is a mix of spaces and tabs. There's magic numbers galore, and variable re-use -- not just local scope, but public methods on objects as well. I've also seen countless assignments within conditionals, and these are apparently intentional! The reasoning: to ensure the code only runs with non-falsey values. While that would indeed work, an early return/next is much clearer, and reduces indentation. It's just. reading through this makes me cringe or literally throw my hands up in frustration and exasperation.

Honestly though, I know why the code is so terrible, and I understand:

The architect/sole dev was new to coding -- I have 5-7 times his current experience -- and the project scope expanded significantly and extremely quickly, and also broke all of its foundation rules. Non-developers also dictated architecture, creating further mess. It's the stuff of nightmares. Looking at what he was able to accomplish, though, I'm impressed. Horrified at the details, but impressed with the whole.

This project is the epitome of "I wrote it quickly and just made it work."

Fortunately, he and I both agree that a rewrite is in order. but at 76k lines (without styling or configuration), it's quite the undertaking.

------

Amusing: after running the codebase through `wc`, it apparently sums to half the word count of "War and Peace"

Story time!

A little over a year ago I was in the hiring process with a new company and countered their initial offer. I was told by the CTO that it was no problem and they would get back to me soon.

A couple days go by and I'm then informed that they're hiring a new IT director and would like me to interview with him as well. It felt kinda lame since I'd already been offered the job but I rolled with it.

When I showed up to the office for an interview I tried to call and let them know I was there and couldn't get a hold of anyone. 30 minutes later I get a call from the CTO saying they couldn't find the new IT director and when they got him to answer the phone he said he had left early and would call me to do a phone interview.

Obviously the whole experience so far has been pretty lame but I stuck with it because I knew the CTO personally. I did the phone interview and quickly realized this dude was a prick, and would be a terrible boss, but I spoke with the CTO again who told me to stick with it and eventually I did get the job.

Fast forward about a month and it's clear the new director is trash. He literally bragged about firing a dude over an accidental outage (wtf!?).

He had the technical experience you'd expect of a junior help desk and his management skills were pretty clearly sub-par.

He was also, for whatever reason, completely unable to communicate with the only woman on our team. When assigning work he would always feel the need to ask if she could 'handle it' rather than just assigning it to her like it's done for everyone else. He was pretty clearly sexist.

The whole team hates this dude by this point but he's somehow managed to woo the executives into thinking he shits gold.

I was helping him set up a Python venv on his machine when I noticed another VPN client installed which certainly piqued my interest. After a bit of digging it was clear he was using company time and company equipment to continue working for his previous employer.

We turned over logs and he was fired the next day. He tried to add me on LinkedIn afterwards and I have never declined something quicker.

Moral of the story is don't be a dickhead.

I hate all of these rants about JavaScript being a terrible language.

In reality, it's one of the easiest languages to work with. This makes it easier for new programmers to write messy code, but is it the language's fault?

People get mad about the things that happen when you multiply "undefined" and a string...what do you expect?

You also have the freedom to choose from a variety of tools the community has created to solve existing problems. People just don't realize that they don't *have* to learn everything, you just learn as you need them.

Don't blame JavaScript for you bad programming, terrible type conversion needs, and great tooling.

It's so fuckin hard to work with people who don't get sarcasm or humour.

The UI guy gives me design (which is a regular design, not something unique)

Me: “wow fresh and unique design (obviously sarcasm).”
Designer: “thanks, I worked on this whole day. Glad you like it.”
Me: “huh...”

Now I feel like a terrible person.

I remember my first software engineer internship, the boss was terrible. He was cheap and only hired interns we had 0 guidance. This mother fucker would say shit in meetings like "hey we should start providing DBAAS, similar to DynamoDB start researching it I want a prototype by Wednesday" Wtf this guy is nuts. The overall product was suppose to be a fucking virtual machine hosting platform to compete with AWS, Digital Ocean, RackSpace etc designed by BS computer science interns lol. This guy tells us in a meeting one day "You know what's the difference between those guys (the competitors) and us?" We all looked around lost. This pompous ass hole says "Me , that's the difference you guys have me " 😂 what a fucking joke , not to mention all he has is a shitty math degree from a bullshit no name college in India, no developing experience what so ever. Man o man I never met anyone that was so fucking stupid but thought they were so fucking smart

Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).

The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)

I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.

So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.

My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.

Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.

I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.

I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.

I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.

But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.

I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.

Fuck off and die.

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

!!office drama

I haven't been around much in recent weeks. Due to family illness, christmas shopping, dealing with estranged parents, and brooding over the foregoing, I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to myself.

tl;dr: The CTO ("API Guy") is ostensibly getting fired, and I might be taking over his job. I don't know if I should accept, try to stave this off, or simply flee.

------

Anyone who has been following my recent rants knows that API Guy is my boss, and he often writes terrible code. It's solid and unbreakable, but reading it is a *nightmare.* One of our applications is half the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and it's difficult to tell what code is live and what amounts to ancient, still-active landmines. This is one application; we have several, most of which I've never even looked at.

Ostensibly the code is so terrible because the company grew extremely quickly, and API Guy needed to cram in lots of unexpected / planned-against features. From what I can see, that seems about right, but I haven't checked timeframes [because that's a lot of work!].

Here's a brief rundown of the situation.
- API Guy co-founded the company with the CEO.
- CEO and API Guy have been friends for a long time.
- CEO belives the company will fail with API Guy as head of tech.
- They could just be testing me; I have zero way of knowing. API Guy seems totally oblivious, and CEO seems sincere, so this feels pretty doubtful.
- CEO likes pushing people around. CEO believes he can push me around. API Guy doesn't budge. (I probably won't, either, except to change task priorities.)
- API Guy's code is huge and awful, but functional.
- API Guy is trying to clean up the mess; CEO doesn't understand (maybe doesn't care).
- Literally nobody else knows how the code works.
- Apart from API Guy and myself, the entire company is extroverted sales people.
- None of these sales people particularly like me.
- Sales people sell and sell and sell without asking development if they can pull enough magic features out of their hat to meet the arbitrary saleslines. (because the answer is usually no)
- If I accept, I would be the sole developer (at first) and responsible for someone else's mountain of nightmarish code, and still responsible for layering on new features at the same pace as he. Pay raise likely, but not guaranteed.
- My getting the position is contingent upon the CEO and the investors, meaning it's by no means guaranteed.
- If I don't accept, likely API Guy will be replaced with someone else of unknown ability, who doesn't know the code, and whom I must answer to regardless. Potentially OK, potentially a monumental disaster.

Honestly, it feels like I'm going to be screwed no matter what course I choose.

Perhaps accepting is slightly better?

The best would be to assume the position of CTO and keep API Guy around -- but that would feel like an insult to him. I doubt he'd be okay with it. But maybe. Who knows? I doubt the CEO would seriously consider that anyway.

I feel like a lamb between a dim, angry rhino, and an oblivious one.

So the CSS code I'm working on has a terrible vertical alignment problem on every browser except IE11. Using `display: flex` =_=

I'm not joking this alignment glitch is driving me nuts! Deadline tomorrow.

I've been working on updates to a react app for a few hours today. Everything's been peachy except this shit job, this inane change demand list, my headache, my lack of quiet places to work, ... okay, so basically everything is terrible. But I've done lots of builds, and made lots of progress.

Then suddenly: my build script failed. 30 seconds after a successful build, with no (tooling) changes in between.

Reason? Incorrect version of Sass.
How? Fucking npm.

Isn't package-lock.json supposed to prevent this crap?

FAKDLKAUSUK.

Long long ago there was a man who discovered if he scratched certain patterns onto a rock he could use them to remind him about things he would otherwise forgot.

Over time the scratching were refined and this great secret of eternal memory were taught to his children, and they taught it to their children.

Soon mankind had discovered a way to preserve through the ages his thoughts and memories and further discovered that if he wrote down these symbols he could transfer information over distances by simply recording these symbols in a portable medium.

Writing exploded it allowed a genius in one place to communicate the information he had recorded across time and space.

Thousands of years passed, writing continued to be refined and more and more vital. Eventually a humble man by the name of Johannes Gutenberg seeking to make the divine word of God accessible to the people created the printing press allowing the written word to be copied and circulated with great ease expanding vastly the works available to mankind and the number of people who could understand this arcane art of writing.

But mankind never satiated in his desire to know all there is to know demanded more information, demanded it faster, demanded it better. So the greatest minds of 200 years, Marconi, Maxwell, Bohr, Von Nueman, Turing and a host of others working with each other, standing on the shoulders of their brobdinangian predecessors, brought forth a way to send these signals, transfer this writing upon beams of light, by manipulating the very fabric of the cosmos, mankind had reach the ultimate limits of transmission of information. Man has conquered time, and space itself in preserving and transmitting information, we are as the gods!

My point is this, that your insistence upon having a meeting to ask a question, with 10 people that could've been answered with a 2 sentence email, is not only an affront to me for wasting my time, but also serves as an affront to the greatest minds of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is an insult to your ancestors who first sacrificed and labored to master the art of writing, it is in fact offensive to all of humanity up to this point.

In short by requiring a meeting to be held, not only are you ensuring the information is delayed because we all now need to find a time that all of us are available, not only are you now eliminating the ability to have a first hand permanent record of what need to be communicated, you are actively working against progress, you are dragging humanity collectively backwards. You join the esteemed ranks of organizations such as the oppressive Catholic church that sought to silence Galialio and Copernicus, you are among the august crowd that burned witches at Salem, the Soviet secret police that silenced "bourgeoisie" science, you join the side of thousands of years of daft ignorance.

If it were not for you people we would have flying cars, we would have nanobots capable of building things on a whim, we would all be programming in lisp. But because of you and people like you we are trapped in this world, where the greatest minds are trapped in meetings that never end, where mistruth and ignorance run rampant, a world where JavaScript is the de facto language of choice every where because it runs everywhere, and ruins everywhere.

So please remember, next time you want to have a meeting ask yourself first. "Could this be an email?" "Do I enjoy burning witches?" if you do this you might make the world a little bit of a less terrible place to be.

STOP SHITTING ON PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES.
Now, I'm not talking to the people that don't take it too serious, but rather to people that think their language is superior and others inferior. Why shit on PHP? A lot of stuff is build with this, including devRant. For me, I'd love to learn any languages that has a proper use for me. (With this sentence I'm excluding all exoteric languages, because they are useless) If anyone says, Python is awesome as fuck, yeah, I FUCKING AGREE. Anyone telling me anything is crap, I disagree. If it's that terrible, how do you know about it? If it was never used ever in a project, how can you know its terrible? You can't. Unless you coded that thing yourself.

Next time don't waste your time on shit like that. I AM ALSO LOOKING AT THE HOLY WAR APPLE VS MICROSOFT VS LINUX

STOP WASTING YOUR TIME WITH SHIT LIKE THIS.

A couple weeks ago, my coworkers built a site where 90% of pages consisted of all images and uncompressed images at that. I'm talking even the text was images. At the time I told my boss that it should be done with css and this would later come to bite them in the ass with page load speed and seo. He ignored me and said it was fine. Well today my boss assigned me with going back and basically removing images with things that can be done with css because load speed was terrible and seo wasnt too hot. Maybe if he listened to me from the get go, he wouldn't have to assign me this unnecessary work and I can focus on cleaning up all the other piss poor excuse of websites they have. Seriously tired of feeling like I, the junior dev is doing the teaching to these "senior developers" who get paid like twice as much as I do when I'm the one who is always doing the cleanups /optimization and guiding them on all their problems. Is it Friday yet?-_-

Just started my new job.

Poorly defined requirements ✅
Expecting things to be done yesterday ✅
Poorly managed teams ✅
Terrible legacy code ✅
Half the development team is offshore ✅

Maybe I’m just selfish, but I need to work in an environment that has the following

A good technology stack.
A competent manager/team leader.
Competent colleagues.
Clearly defined documentation.
A proper onboarding process.

Why is this so difficult to find in organisations?

The code is a freaking mess. Shared behavior, terrible variable/method naming, misleading module naming, dynamic polymorphic spaghetti, whitespace errors, no consistency, confusing even if you understand what the code is doing, ... . It should never have passed code review. It probably wasn't code reviewed.

The comments are sparse and useless. Quality level: // This is bridge.

The documentation does not exist.

Testing steps for QA are missing several steps, including setup, so actually using the feature is bloody challenging. If one thing is wrong, the feature just doesn't show up (and ofc won't tell you why).

The specs for the feature are outdated and cover only 4 of 19+ cases. And are neigh useless for those 4.

The specs for the report I'm fixing don't even check the data on the report; it just checks for one bit of data on each row it creates -- a name -- which is also the same on each row. gg.

The object factories (for specs) are a mess, and often create objects indirectly, or in backwards order with odd post-create overwriting to make things work. Following the factories is a major chore, let alone fixing or extending them.

The new type has practically zero test coverage.

The factory for the new type also only creates one variant -- and does so incorrectly.

And to top it all off: the guy who wrote the feature barely ever responds. If he does, he uses fewer words than my bird knows, then stops responding. I've yet to get a useful answer out of him. (and he apparently communicates just fine, according to my micromanager.)

But "it's just fixing a report; it'll be easy!"
Oh, fuck off.

"WTH! Get the fuck out of here, bitch!!".

I started a new job today (remote) and my first task was to improve product sign-up process, basically the UX is shit and the backend is even worse, never felt so bad looking at terrible software design my entire life and career. My first assignment was to introduce some sanity. (Mr. Supervisor's exact words)

Anyway, I report directly to upper management but need to get onboarded by current technology expert who's highly skilled at writing shitty code and is also stupid, literally.

It took the whole day to get him to grant access to the private repo in order to start working but that's not the story.

So, I'm seated, demoralised about the structure of software I have to work on and here I was refreshing localhost:7878 consistently and was consistently getting the message:
"WTH! Get the fuck out of here, bitch!!".

So, this same codebase I have is suppose to be the exact same one that's powering the app in production. I was furious and confused. Is stupid calling me a bitch already??? He wants to fuck??? What the hell!!!

I called him and turns out, I was suppose to switch branches. The branch I had was suppose to show that message intentionally (??!???!???) (His words exactly), I couldn't even muster the words "Why" completely before he hung up.

So basically, I got onboarded today. Quite successfully, I must add, because I know exactly the battlesuit I have to wear to my new remote job going forward!

I’m adding some fucking commas.
It should be trivial, right?
They’re fucking commas. Displayed on a fucking webpage. So fucking hard.

What the fuck is this even? Specifically, what fucking looney morons can write something so fucking complicated it requires following the code path through ten fucking files to see where something gets fucking defined!?

There are seriously so fucking many layers of abstraction that I can’t even tell where the bloody fucking amount transforms from a currency into a string. I’m digging so deep in the codebase now that any change here will break countless other areas. There’s no excuse for this shit.

I have two options:
A) I convert the resulting magically conjured string into a currency again (and of course lose the actual currency, e.g. usd, peso, etc.), or

B) Refactor the code to actually pass around the currency like it’s fucking intended to be, and convert to a string only when displaying. Like it’s fucking intended to be.

Impossible decision here.

If I pick (A) I get yelled at because it’s bloody wrong. “it’s already for display” they’ll say. Except it isn’t. And on top of that, the “legendary” devs who wrote this monstrosity just assumed the currency will always be in USD. If I’m the last person to touch this, I take the blame. Doesn’t matter that “legendary Mr. Apple dev” wrote it this way. (How do I know? It’s not the first time this shit has happened.) So invariably it’ll be up to me to fix anyway.

But if I pick (B) and fix it now, I’ll get yelled at for refactoring their wonderful code, for making this into too big of a problem (again), and for taking on something that’s “just too much for me.” Assholes. My après Taco Bell bathroom experiences look and smell better than this codebase. But seriously, only those two “legendary” devs get to do any real refactoring or make any architecture decisions — despite many of them being horribly flawed. No one else is even close to qualified… and “qualified” apparently means circle jerking it in Silicon Valley with the other better-than-everyone snobs, bragging about themselves and about one another. MojoJojo. “It was terrible, but it fucking worked! It fucking worked!” And “I can’t believe <blah> wanted to fix that thing. No way, this is a piece of history!” Go fuck yourselves.

So sorry I don’t fit in your stupid club.

Oh, and as an pointed, close-at-hand example of their wonderful code? This API call I’m adding commas to (it’s only used by the frontend) uses a json instance variable to store the total, errors, displayed versions of fees/charges (yes they differ because of course they do), etc. … except that variable isn’t even defined anywhere in the class. It’s defined three. fucking. abstraction. layers. in. THREE! AND. That wonderful piece of smelly garbage they’re so proud of can situationally modify all of the other related instance variables like the various charges and fees, so I can’t just keep the original currency around, or even expect the types to remain the same. It’s global variable hell all over again.

Such fucking wonderful code.

I fucking hate this codebase and I hate this fucking company. And I fucking. hate. them.

Let's portray Stallman as a malevolent criminal, dying on the creepiest hill, shall we? Apparently there's even people that make statements such as "if you defend RMS, you're just as terrible as he is".

Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Do you have any idea what the case even is?
Richard Stallman has a controversial opinion about a rape case committed by someone else. Gee, what a shocker, people have opinions. Does that make Stallman a criminal himself?

Oh but he's representing open source software. That's why he can't be there.
Oh yeah. Shunning him (and erroneously so) as another Reiser is gonna make open source look so good, isn't it.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writer of Voltaire

People are entitled to any opinion they may have. Just because you disagree with it (and in this case I do too!) does not mean that it can be used to criminalize someone and to ruin their career. That is just wrong.

I get a call from a client at 7 PM:
- Client: We have a business partner that just visited the website you just made for us and he said it was absolutely terrible, things are not showing up, layout is all messed up... *sends photo*. This is a VERY important new business partner and this will affect our relationship and image. Fix it NOW!
- Me: ok? I will check ... *proceed to check on several browsers and versions*
- Me: I checked on all modern browsers, cleaned cache, tried from multiple devices, it seems to be fine. What browser is your partner visiting the site from?
- Client: Idk, let me ask ...
- Client: Internet Explorer
- Me: ... that browser is not even supported anymore wth?!
- Client: We need it fixed!
- Me: ... *proceeds and hacks for IE website until 6 AM*

Old boss story. This guy was nice but a terrible boss. Also relevant, he has a background in IT so should know better.

Him: So when you wanna check a password is correct you just unhash it in the database?
Me: *facepalm*

Me: Hey we should be doing unit and integration testing at a minimum to lower bugs.
Him: We don't need those, we're not a bank. If a problem comes up we just fix it and push to production.
(A while later)
Him(in email): Why do we keep getting bugs reported. Don't you devs test your code.

I was mildly annoyed at that one.

Him: We're always over budget on projects, how can we fix this.
Me: What if we increase our quotes.(technically there are other ways as well but not really possible at that time)
Him: We can't do that, clients won't want to pay.

Me: *finishing off my handover as I'm leaving for a new job*
Him: Wow you do a lot of work

So, a few months ago I agreed to rewrite a previous employer's OAuth app -- paid work, ofc, if below my usual rate. It's a rewrite because the project is so deprecated and fragile that upgrading it is likely much more difficult.

however, I drastically overestimated how much free time I would have. I thought I could shave off an hour a day to spend on it, and get the project done in a few weeks. However, it turns out I barely have twenty minutes a day to myself, and it's only after I'm mentally exhausted from the day's efforts.

I don't think I'm capable of completing the project given the demands on my time -- even if it's relatively straightforward to do.

I don't want to tell them no, especially after waiting on me for this. but I don't think I have a choice.

I feel terrible.

The worst project is the one I am currently working on. I didn’t build it but have to manage it, because... Reasons.

The projects is made on Core PHP(red flag right there).
But when I dig in I get to see there is no authentication used in any of the REST service. Yup. What's the fucking point of login if you are just going to update profiles based on user_id you Twat! The querying used is simply mysql_query (I have to say I expected that).
No relationships defined in the Mysql table structure. No migrations.
There is an upload feature which is forcing the image to be saved as jpeg, therby corrupting the images being saved on the server.
No security, terrible logic, no classes, terrible architecture.

And I am the chosen one to maintain this shit!

Truely, FML!!!

This is not an interview test just an awkward experience in general regarding interview.

This happened two years ago when I was a fresh university graduate looking for a job in UK as an immigrant (Im EU national).

Went to an interview for a web dev+tech support position. Two fat guys with tshirts met me and started interviewing me for a sysadmin position. Started asking me about disaster recovery and stuff.

Turns out recruiter messed up not only companies but positions as well. Also these two guys didnt bother to check anything.

I pulled out the job ad for which I applied originally, interviewers had a look at it and still proceeded questioning me while knowing that I prepared for completely different position interview.

Needless to say, it went terrible and I didnt get the job. I dont know if its just me or Im unlucky, but I had a lot of encounters in UK with so many incompetent recruiters.

Hello everyone.
I've seen people doing story/rant to introduce themselves, and I never done that, probably because I'm terrible at doing so, and the more people their is, the more complicated it gets for me. 😥
Usually I try to blend in, and be the same color as the wall. But I want to try something different, so bear with me as I go through this painful process. 😶

So here I am, a lonely dev, who only have friends through a screen, living in a dark room only lit by green leds (tho sometimes it turn red/pink), lost in a small street of Paris. I usually avoid posting on social media, but here on devRant, I feel alright, somehow, it feels like home... 🤗

Started developing at 14 with html and php, then css and js (with the later still being a mystery to me). 🤔
I never really had a real job. Had 3 month as an intern into a human size web agency, and despite the recommandation they gave, I didn't like the job... Dropped from school and self learned everything I know today. Did a certain amount of personal projects, but no publication for lack of confidence. As of today, I'm 28. 🙂

Then a year and half ago, I changed to c# with unity3D, and I had a ton of fun since. 😄
Learned cg effect, texturing, 3d, a bit of animation. I'm working on a project of indi game with two people that are my only social interaction outside of my family, and now devRant. I don't mind being lonely tho. 😯

But this community is awesome, so I'm glad I stumbled across that sad face on the play store. 😄

Also it's 7:30am, I didn't sleep because of this post, I'm tired, and yes I'm an idiot.

Remote IT work. I had a caller immediately berate and try to insult me because she recognized my very Southern accent wasn't local and I wasn't onsite. They tried to insinuate I wouldn't know what they were talking about with "do you even know what [x] is?" Calmly, I said yes ma'am. This is before she ever got to what her issue was. It was command line things I needed to run to fix it, but she wouldn't stop talking. "Are you even trying to help me or do anything? You must not know what you're doing." I'm a terrible multitasker so I end up sometimes typing what I hear, saying what I read, or zoning out of everything to accomplish a particular thing. So it took me a minute or two longer than normal. But that call wasn't what pissed me off. It was the complete 180 she turned when she emailed in when I resolved the ticket, praising me for how knowledgeable and professional I was, that I almost considered it all a troll.

I don't have very many high emotion stories and neither is this one. I'm pretty laid back, go with it, person.

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

the effort to get girls, and children for that matter into programming has been terrible. I never thought I could find something worse than code.org, but here it is: SmartGurlz (because what could be smarter than spelling your own gender wrong, right?). this was on shark tank and this lady was making robots to try to get girls into programming. they pretty much control dolls on wheels by means of scratch. it's terrible. first of all, how the fuck is that profitable? when a little girl wants to play dolls, what kind of girl wants to *program* it first. jesus, no kid wants that.

second, this girls who code thing makes me barf. the thought process for many organizations trying to push girls to code is "hmm, if we isolate girls and give them lower standards, then maybe they'll decide to go into a male-dominated industry," because, fuck logic right? idiocy is dreadful. lastly, what I hate most about so many of the girls coding organizations, is the fact that they have to embrace the stereotypes. almost every single one cares about "feelings" or something similar. its bullshit.

and don't get me wrong, women should have equal opportunity, but pushing them into stem fields isn't good. bias in the workplace is what we should be talking about, or other topics like women being paid less. trying to make girls interested in programming is complete bullshit, let them do what they want.

back to "SmartGurlz," I looked them up and they confirmed what I expected. the first thing I see? not anything related to programming whatsoever, but different dolls wearing different outfits. girls deserve something better, and shouldn't have to deal with organizations trying to push them into something they don't want to do.

Has anyone ever donated a website and its maintenance/hosting to a charity?
There's a pet rescue/homing RSPCA centre near me and their website is terrible. I keep thinking about doing this for them.
Thoughts?

there is another team in our company that has its site in the US. we haven't been working with them for very long, but we do have some common topics on which we work loosely together and exchange some information from time to time. i have met the guys only once in person when they visited Germany.

PM asked one of the devs of this team if he could move to another time zone, so it would be easier for us in Europe to arrange meetings with him.

move to another timezone. within the US. to the other side of the country where there's noone he knows. also, no site of ours.
only so it's easier for PM to arrange fucking meetings with him.

can you believe that? i cringed so hard when PM told me about that. (of course the guy refused, shocked pikachu)
and when he thought aloud that maybe he should ask the guy to move to Germany, i told him that the colleague wouldn't do that and that this was a terrible idea. he was really surprised and asked "hmm, you think?"

dafuq, hell yeah i think?!

Stuck on windows for a bit more now after my little Arch fuckup and holy shit I forgot how terrible running android studio on windows is...

*Opens project, waits for windows to unfreeze*

*Waits for gradle to load lets windows unfreeze*

*Opens AVD and watches RAM usage go to 100%*

*Sips now cold coffee that was made when opening Android Studio*

Ugh, I miss Arch...

PS. Yes I know this is an android studio thing and not a Wndows problem

Hey Root, remember that super high-priority ticket that we ignored for five months before demanding you rewrite it a specific way in one day?

Yeah, the new approach we made you use broke the expected usecases, and now the page is completely useless to the support team and they're freaking out. Drop everything you're doing and go fix it! Code-complete for this release is tonight! -- This right after "impacting our business flow" while being collapsed on the fucking floor.

Jesus FUCKING christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

If I dropped the ball on a high-priority ticket for two weeks, I'd get fired, let alone for five fucking months.

If I was a manager and demanded a one-day rewrite I can only imagine the amount of chewing out I'd receive, especially on something high-priority.

And let's not forget product ownership: imagine if I screwed up feature planning for someone so badly I made them break a support tool in production. I'd never hear the end of it.

Fucking double standards.

And while I'm at it. Some of the code I've seen in this codebase is awful. Uncommented spaghetti, or an unreadable mess with single-letter variables, super-tightly coupled modules so updates are nearly impossible, typos in freaking constants added across sixty+ files, obviously-incorrect comments, ... . I'll have to start posting snippets to show them off. But could I get away with any of it? ha. Hell no. My code must be absolutely perfect. I hear about any and every flaw, doesn't matter how minor, and nothing can go out until everything is just so.

Hell, I even hear about flaws in other peoples' code during my code reviews. Why? Because I should have fixed it, that's why. But if I do, I get yelled at for "muddying the waters."

Just. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

It's like playing a shell game where no matter which shell I pick (or point to their goddamn sleeve where they're clearly hiding it), I get insulted for being so consistently useless, and god damn, how can I never find the fucking pea or follow the damned rules? I'm so terrible and this is why "nobody trusts me." Fuck you.

I'll tell you why I can't find your damned pea: IT'S RATTLING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HEADS, you ASSHOLE FUCKING IMBECILES.

That's right: one pea among the lot of them.

goddamn I am fucking pissed off.

FUCK LINUX

now that I have your attention, and you’re probably angry, too, please, even if you don’t read this rant, never use code.org again. now, onto the rant…

god dammit, code.org sucks. I mean, anyone who created it or associates with it should, well, be considered a terrorist. they’re bombing students futures in computer science with false, useless, bullshit information. not to mention, their sponsors like bill gates, mark zuckerburg, and other rich asses, talk in a video about some boring ass shit that is hard to understand for anyone who doesn’t program, and not to mention, they use a fucking five dollar microphone. ear rape. even if you look at a textual version of it, then read the information on it, it’s practically useless because it's so terribly explained, and also useless. ironically enough, they focus on their animations more than their actual explinations, or their students for that matter. the fact that we had to encode a picture in binary, made me about 50% dumber, give or take a 0 or 1. then, we had to do it in hex, which wasn’t really much better, although more realistic I supposed. what's really the most depressing thing about this class is its application in the real world. I've learnt nothing whatsoever that will help me in the real world, or in computer science. I suppose there's two things that may be useful (that I already knew): hex, and that TCP doesn't lose packets. that's it. those two things. five seconds worth of knowledge from the first quarter of the year. the ideas just make me want to throw up. teaching the main ideas of computer science without actually teaching it? one of the teachers (probably a good one) enrolled her students in an online programming course just so they could understand, because the explanations are just so terrible. this is the only [high school] computer science course offered by code.org, and I signed up because it's an AP computer science class (tried to get into AP Java, the day I was supposed to take the test to get into an upper level class, I was told it didn't count as a tech credit). seriously, fuck code.org. it makes you dumber. their 'app lab' environment is pointless, just like everything else. the app lab is basically where you have a set of commands and have to make a dog bark() or a storm trooper miss() [and that's hell when they haven't introduced while loops yet]. the app lab is literally code.org going out of their way to make everything that their students are learning pointless in the real world. seriously, why can't we just use a <canvas> like an ACTUAL PROGRAMMER would do if they were to make a browser game, not use an app engine so slow it would be faster to update windows and android studio each time I run an 'app' in their 'environment'. their excuse is that the skills "transfer over" to the real world. BITCH! IF I DIDN'T KNOW JAVA, AND I WANTED TO MAKE A GAME IN JAVA, I'M NOT GOING TO LEARN PYTHON, THEN "TRANSFER" THE SKILLS I LEARNT, I'M GOING TO LEARN FUCKING JAVA. AND THAT GOES FOR EVER OTHER LANGUAGE, PROJECT, ETC.

I'm begging you code.org, stop, get help.

Background: I work at a small startup company in Canada who makes simple FAQ Chatbots for companies who waste a lot of resources on the same Customer questions over and over.

So we were making this one bot for a provincial government who wanted a bot for students to be able to ask questions regarding the upcoming election and how to vote, etc. and get the answers they were looking for. Since it's Canada and a government bot, it had to be in both English AND French.

These bots take some time to train (we use Wit.ai mostly) in english so it was a challenge to train it in French. However I am bilingual (not very strong in French but can manage) so I did my best and the bot didn't turn out too bad. (English was great, French was, Id say, "not terrible").

HOWEVER, now that it is done (The company loved it, even with the less than perfect french version). The sales team (who know nothing of the process of making/training these bots) is now telling companies we support "SEVERAL LANGUAGES" and are currently about to sign a contract with a company overseas that wants a bot done IN JAPANESE!!.

To make matters worse.. when we (the dev team) brought up that it would be EXTREMELY difficult to do this, their answer was ... "You did it in French so you can just do the same but in Japanese"

HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE.

Oh well, Rosetta Stone here I come, I guess it's time to learn Japanese.

My life could get worse, but it's really shitty now.

Suffering from a serious back injury since last year, my health has been not so positieve lately.
It put a toll on my mood, which in turn asked it's price regarding my relationship. Needless to say that did not go well. Already a fe months single but we kept in touch.

Three days ago my back injury returned, and was unable to lead a normal life. Constant pain, coyld not even move in the house. Even going to the toilet was a terrible experience because when you move, you're in a world of pain.

I asked my ex girlfriend to help me, since she was the only one having a key to my house.

When she arrived i hoped to have some moral support and to help me mive around, ensuring i would not injure myself any more.

Instead i received the cold shoulder. When she wanted to help pe up she did it a bit too hard and the pain sheered thrpughout my body. Screaming in pain.

She promptly left, leaving keys behind.

The hardest part is that she just left without me being able to explain clearly why i screamed. She thought i was yelling at her while in reality i was yelling due to the immense pain.

After that i had to cut ties forever. Tabula rasa. So i removed everything that is related to that time and locked it in my vault.

Since then i can hardly focus, my mibd is numb and i cannot think straight. The alcohol and other sedatives are probably also involved, but still i feel my life is a mountain of depressing shit.

Needed to vent. And yes i post this because i have a need for some understanding, yes for now i crave for some attention and some encouraging, supportive words. I'm left With no other options since the person i wanted it from the most has simply left... And the fact i am unable to actually be social outside...

Fuck friends and relationships, right?

I’m pretty terrible at soldiering and small electronics in general, but I’m kind of okay with how this turned out.

Back story:
That helmet is my sister-in-law’s, she drives a polaris slingshot. (It’s technically a motorcycle here in the US because it has three wheels.) and she hooked up some EL wire to her helmet and the larger black rectangle in the picture is what the battery pack looked like before. (It takes two AA batteries.) and doesn’t have anyway to recharge them natively.

I did some research and found a neat little charging board (TP4056) and got her a small single cell li-ion battery for it. Now it’s not only less than half the length of the original, but it has a rechargeable battery and a charging circuit built in. The battery is 500mAh and lasts about 65-70mins on a charge. Personally, I feel like that’s not a good enough battery life on a charge, but my sis-in-law says that her and her slingshot friends usually only run with the EL lights on for 30 minute stretches at time so they should be able to get two to three uses before needing a recharge. Which btw, only takes about 35-40 minutes from completely dead.

The box looks like shit cause I literally hacked away at the original casing with a pocket knife and then crammed all the pieces back in and hot-glued the casing together. But I took measurements of the final-ish design and will try to find a small electronics box that will be able to house everything internally. (L: 1-3/4” W: 1-1/4” H: 1-1/4”)

I hate buying new laptops. HATE IT. The manufacturers are always trying to do something that makes it more complicated to buy a laptop confidently.

Why not name all of the laptops with numbers? Make them really hard to differentiate. Then offer the same model number across multiple years so it is difficult to determine which year the laptop is from.

Oh. And let’s make sure every laptop has a major flaw in the form factor.

Let’a add a numpad that squishes the keyboard to the left in a weird way. Lets do something to the trackpad to make it awkward to use. Maybe the keyboard should have a weird configuration. Maybe we can put 4 spare characters of various colours on the symbol key caps. How about a battery only lasts a few hours. May we add specialized hardware so you are stuck with windows. Maybe we can make it super thick and heavy. Lets have a screen with terrible viewing angles. Since this laptop has no major flaws we should overprice it. No repairs or upgrades on this one because we filled the computer with glue. Lets double the amount of useless media keys.

It is like manufacturers are trying to design laptops like RPG game character classes. The fighter has no magic or stealth. The magician is weak and gets fatigued. The rogue is very stealthy but has poor defence and attack. The cleric can use magic but only to heal so it is useless in battle. The ranger is good at distance but has poor defence and no magic.

The only notebooks sold that are trying to make balanced character classes are MacBooks. Those cost a premium and aren’t reparable.

I just spent 2 hours helping a fellow Sr Dev format an “if block” in code. Then helped show them how to step through the code. This is what passes as a senior at my company? I no joke have stayed at this job for 6 more months than I wanted to out of pure pity for my team. I want to quit so bad, but the team is in such terrible shape and can’t hire anyone new that is willing to stay. All good people personally, but gosh this job is just brain dead and eats my weekends when I should be focusing on family. Back to helping through the 500 line if block. There are worse things in life, but this just feels terrible.

TLDR: SAP sucks. Don't ever work with it. Run away from it. Delete it from your memory. If your company works with it, quit. It's the best you can do.

A couple of weeks ago the group rant was "Story of your best/worst career choice" and I talked about the contract I signed. Even tho that is still true and I still feel like that, I think I got a new worst choice:

WORKING WITH SAP.

When I got this job I knew it would be SAP, but I didn't know what SAP was. I just thought "it's programming, how bad can it be?" OH BOII.

If only I would have done some FUCKING RESEARCH I would know this would be a mistake!!

And I knew I didn't want to work with this, I knew I wanted to be a web developer, but I STILL ACCEPTED THE JOB OH MAN WHAT WAS I THINKING I'M SO MAD.

Were I live we all have the same mentality when looking for the first job, which is to just accept anything you can get, because it's your first job, you need to work and to get experience, even if it's a bad job or if you know you won't like it. When my intership was ending, I told my parents I didn't want to stay there because they treat their employes like shit, and the salary is terrible. They told me to still accept it if they offered because I still need a job (this one was web tho) and experience.

So, of course, since I was looking for my first job, was told this my entire live, always thought like that and they were the first to contact me, I accepted it.

BIGGEST FUCKING MISTAKE!! DON'T THINK LIKE THIS!! AND STOP TELLING KIDS THIS!! IT'S NOT A GOOD MENTALITY!!!

ALSO DON'T WORK WITH SAP! EVER!

I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.

Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.

I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.

This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.

One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.

Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation

There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.

Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.

A month or so ago this manufacturer of soldering equipment contacted me with the request to make a video about a review unit (a soldering handle) that they'd send to me for free in exchange. Initially I was really pumped about it - company would send me free stuff!! - but fast-forward to today and I realized how terrible a choice I've made by accepting that offer.

See, that handle is worth only €40 and I've spent so much time on the bloody video material already that it'd make my "pay" expected to be close to €1/h if not less. I feel like I've been exploited, especially since I don't even like the handle's design and am not using it. It's just collecting dust, making my work essentially free labor.

I could return the item but that's gonna cost me a fuckload of money, I could pay for the handle and cut my losses that way.. or I could do the review anyway and end up feeling very bad about that company. Or I could tell them to fuck off and lose a supply chain for my soldering equipment.

I have no idea what to do about this..

Oh and the fact that the correspondent in that company has the worst Chinglish skills imaginable, the communication skills of a toddler and is also super indecisive (they asked me to make a YouTube video first which led me to assume a video format for YouTube, but instead they want to put it on their fucking AliExpress product page, rendering my existing video footage useless!) doesn't help either.. I hate that shit company. Fucking leeches!

Anyway, what would you do when you're in a position like that?

One of the things I really hate on Windows (and Microsoft software in general) is that the keyboard shortcuts are localized therefore are different from 90% of the apps that I use on a daily basis.

Two examples of this (EN-US vs PT-PT):
- "Save" is "Gravar" while "Underline" is "Sublinhar". This means that whenever I press Ctrl + S to save a doc in MS Word I underline a word instead of saving the bloody document.
- "All" is "Tudo" so when I want to select all the itens on a folder in the File Explorer I have to press Ctrl + T, the same shortcut I press in pretty much every single tabbed app to open a new tab.

This is terrible for the user experience because different languages provide different keyboard shortcuts to the user which goes against the concept of the usefulness of a keyboard shortcut: perform an action from anywhere without having to know its menu or menu description.

So some programmers (specially C programmers, it seems) have this terrible habit of writing very short-named variables. Then in order to understand the code, you need to decipher the meaning of each variable. Example:

```
unsigned int i, n, h, mw, my, ty;
```

This is from one of the "Suckless" projects by the way. They pride themselves in having small number of code lines so this is probably why.

Oh God, oh fuck!! My bank!! That I don't bank with. It's DIsaBlEd!!!!! OH GOD OH FUcK MY MONEY!!! This is terrible, take my password!!!!! Have it!! I need to RESET THE DAMAGE OH GOD

This freaking laptop.

The WiFi randomly stops working -- and by that, I mean the hardware is no longer detectable, let alone functional. It simply disappears on boot, even from dmesg.

The same happens with audio and bluetooth: on some boots they simply do not exist.

The power usage is also ridiculous: the battery dies in about two hours, and it gets soo hot. Toasty wrists unless I use my tiny bluetooth keyboard ☹ So I need to fiddle with powertop a bit more.

nVidia drivers are also a bloody pain, and having two graphics cards this is even more difficult to set up. I still haven't managed. (nvidia-driver, bumblebee, optimus, official driver messes, manual xorg configs, ...). So I have a beautiful 4k built-in display running at 4-18 fps, and a non-functional 4k external. That's fine for now, but >.>; frustrating.

In better news! I just managed to get the sound to work by backporting the new 4.19 kernel (yay!) -- I have never been so happy to hear an ad. but fixing the sound killed my bluetooth. (The `bluetooth` utility reports the adapter is present, but nothing else can seem to see it 🙄) So now I'm going to have burning hot wrists all day and want to cry because terrible sweaty awfulness.

Just. It's frustrating.

It's fast, though.
and ever so pretty.

My company claims to have a talent retention problem, which to an extent is true. But then they humble brag about how their salary system works and I am like "Yeah that makes sense." See what they fail to realize is that software engineering isn't as niche (using that term loosely) as the other engineering disciplines they hire. They only adjust salaries based on those of the sector they're in and not the software industry itself. They say "we don't compare ourselves to Microsoft and Google because we're not in the same sphere." I'm like "yeah, but when you have a sw staff that regularly snags you patents and are considered some of the best in the industry, where the hell do you think they're gonna go?"

I guess what I'm saying is I want them to raise their average salary because I'm terrible and I must use the threat of them losing the smart guys if I am ever to get paid more. I see no holes in this plan.

!rant but emotional

Work is significantly less terrible than it could be because I have the best teammates and i can come rant here and be understood. My non tech friends just ask why I don't quit if I "complain" so much. My dev and tech friends are all together at another company and have releases every week they're working on. I appreciate you all and am happy I found this community. 💚

Argh,

Today - you son of a bitch.

It all started with a 2 hour flight out of town for business, and I mean started as in I needed to be at the airport at 4:30am!

Despite 2 coffee's to get me out of bed I proceeded to indulge myself in the magic juice, 3 cups later and it felt like my heart belonged in a Grand Prix.

Now here is the sticky part, we where briefed that we would only be doing 2 site meetings and that was it.

Low and be hold it got worse, turns out that we would be pitching our product to 3 highly regarded CEO's, now bare in mind that my position on this trip is as the lead developer, and don't get me wrong I am well up to date on every aspect of the business, hence why they sent me.

So more coffee down the gullet, and eventually the conversation leads back to a project that I had developed to allow authorization of debit orders online, now usually I'm quite a well presented person in these types of situations, but you don't realize how quick this can change.

A quick jump to the geography of the location I was doing business. Johannesburg, South Africa - its as dry as hell, smoggy and at a very higher altitude "as in above sea level".

Now unfortunately none of the above factors where helping me much at all.

Now back to where I am being asked about my project, and never in my life have I tripped over my own words, I went completely blank, I'm surprised I didn't pass out to be honest.

Now despite the death stare and my colleague kicking me under the table, I am feeling pretty terrible, fortunately I had a kick ass team that was able to cover my ass!

Luckily I was able to recover ( 2 muffins and about 3 bottles of water later). We where able to salvage the meeting and it turned out pretty well, I regained my energy and we made it happen!

Must say the flight back was amazing! Almost empty and we all had a row of seats to ourselves, which resulted in some major comfort stretching!

Thanks for tolerating my essay, I'd love to hear if anyone has had anything of the sorts happen to them.

My gym decided to adopt a fitness app so members could sign up for classes. Their onboarding was terrible (to be nice about it). I really hate when businesses don’t understand the technology they want to use.

Me: I downloaded the app, but all the classes say to call the gym.

Gym: Are you using the email that’s on file for your apartment?

Me: Yes, I am because I read the gym’s instructions for using the app.

Gym: …

Me: I think the issue is I had an existing account on the app before the gym decided to use the app for its business.

Gym: Then that’s the problem. Delete your account and sign up for a new one.

Me: WTF 🤬 I am not deleting an account that I’ve had FOR YEARS just because you can’t figure out technical issues with the vendor. How did it never occur to you that gym members might already have accounts for a fitness app that’s been around for years and used by other businesses? Besides, this app doesn’t let users delete accounts from the app so I don’t know where you’re coming from with telling me to delete my account.

Here I am trying to get some tickets for a theater, and I noticed an interesting thing. It seems that the website holds no session persistence. In other words it doesn't check to see if the user has stopped trying to order tickets, instead it holds the seats for about 30 minutes. This is kind of stupid because when you back out, your treated as a completely new session, you have no way of trying to get back the seats you had chosen.

Sooo, what does this mean? It means that I can start selecting a bunch of seats and continue selecting a bunch of seats. There appears to be no server-side checks to prevent someone from just booking the entire theater.

Soooooo, what does this mean? I could potentially spam the entire country's theaters (any that use this website as a booking system) and make it impossible for people to book seats through this website.

What do you guys think? Is this a bug or feature?

Yeah, sure Fortune. Please tell me more about my personal finances that you know nothing about.

The longer this drags on the more it feels like a war against the proletariat.

I also feel like the aristocracy is building a terrible financial charade that will be the toast of the town by November. They REALLY want to make sure the labor doesn't see any rise in wages. Can't have those peons thinking they can get ahead, right?

It's going to be the best sales pre-thanksgiving! It's going to be so popular one would say it's going to be on sale on fire, or is it a fire sale?

When November rolls around, I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

So yeah, we released our app for 26k people to use two days ago. Due to circumstances not under our control, that was developed way faster than it should've. Today we're two days in and everything is going horrible. 26 thousand people are having trouble using it (not every problem is our fault, but ofc they don't give a shit) and our support team is not big enough to handle every request. We're not able to find any more people to help us handle it, so some developers are being used for support. But that slows the bugfixes a lot. We're at risk of losing our jobs because we will not be able to make it work in due time.

In Italy, at the beginning of the year a particular type of invoice became necessary and to handle that everyone needs a particular kind of email called "certified", you know, because Italy, and today our certified email server went offline for the whole fucking day because the provider was an overload of feces. We were overwhelmed by the amount of people that needed help.

I don't even know what to say, if we don't fix it we're fucking fucked, like literally.

I really hope everyone is having a nice new year. For us, this is going terrible.

Game Streaming is an absolute waste.

I'm glad to see that quite a lot of people are rightfully skeptical or downright opposed to it. But that didn't stop the major AAA game publishers announcing their own game streaming platforms at E3 this weekend, did it?

I fail to see any unique benefit that can't be solved with traditional hardware (either console or PC)

- Portability? The Nintendo Switch proved that dedicated consoles now have enough power to run great games both at home and on the go.

- Storage? You can get sizable microSD cards for pretty cheap nowadays. So much so that the Switch went back to use flash-based cartridges!

- Library size/price? The problem is even though you're paying a low price for hundreds of games, you don't own them. If any of these companies shut down the platform, all that money you spent is wasted. Plus, this can be solved with backwards compatibility and one-time digital downloads.

- Performance on commodity hardware? This is about the only thing these streaming services have going for it. But unfortunately this only works when you have an Internet connection, so if you have crap Internet or drop off the network, you're screwed. And has it ever occurred to people that maybe playing Doom on your phone is a terrible UX experience and shouldn't be done because it wasn't designed for it?

I just don't get it. Hopefully this whole fad passes soon.

So I wrote an application that loads data from a 3rd party API. It allows the user to enter a record locator number and pull it up. By design, the value can be a partial match and it will pull up the record still.

The first API call I make only took 2-3 seconds, so I didn't see an issue as it's loading most of the data the app needs. I keep the filters/fields as they are and move on.

Fast forward 6 months. The user is complaining that the records are taking 30-45 seconds to load. Sure enough, load times are terrible. I've made lots of changes to what fields I'm loading through the API, and I'm calling several additional APIs, so I start pulling pieces of code out to see if anything improves. They all barely make any difference--still 30+ second load times. I end up removing everything except the first API call I developed that was taking 2-3 seconds before. Still taking 30+ seconds.

The 3rd party API allows you to filter using "starts with" or "contains". I used "contains" initially and had no issue, but I decided to try "starts with" since it should fit most use cases.

Load time is less than one second. I add back everything else. Load time is just over a second.

It seems that the 3rd party updated the API and multiplied load times by 10 when using that particular filter. I spent almost an hour on this since the platform doesn't support performance or debugging tools very well, and it all came down to a one line fix.

how often does it happen that you have to prevent terrible architectural decisions from being made, because people who are in charge but obviously have no clue, make really weird suggestions and are really confident that this is a good idea?

PM: so please analyze functionalities X with dev Y, since module Y that dev Y develops shall provide these functionalities.
me: as i said yesterday, module Y will use my module X and shouldn't care about how this is going to be implemented.
PM: yeah, but module Y shall be able to... (lists some functionalities)
me: yes, that's what i'm currently working on in module X. my current state of the API can be used in a way that... (lists different low level functions and how a combination of them can be used to provide these functionalities)
PM: okay, hmm... i just realize that module Y will actually be a user of module X...

well.... yeah?!!
i always thought that was crystal clear?? 🤦‍♀️

Oh look, you aren't doing shit. You have 2 weeks worth of testing to complete and you are checking out stories on the Yahoo front page.

Useless. Completely incompetent. Idiot. Imbecile. Moron. Stupid. How dense? Let me count the ways...

Do you know anything?! You use big words to sound important and look like you know your shit. In reality, you have no clue!

How you have managed to capture this job is baffling to me. It shows there is much work to be done to filter out toxic, incompetent people like you. Otherwise, the industry will be plagued with a terrible fear of sub-par employees.

Your lack of common decency for the office space is appalling. Your attitude and "can do no wrong" personality is disgusting. And the cherry on top? It is impossible for you to admit mistakes and take ownership for your actions. You can be inexperienced, stressed out, or even make a mistake once in a while. Yet, the moment you DO fuck up and act like nothing was your fault, that most of it was MY fault, or the TEST environment's fault, or the other team's fault, a lack of resources, a lack of time, ANYTHING but your own damn incompetence, you are dead to me.

You are, by far, the worst co-worker I have ever had.

Terrible week. Micromanagement killing all progress. The only positive note this week is that we got a new scent of soap.

Thank the gods I like citrus...

"Graphics don't matter."

I ranted a while back about gamedev being hard to get into for me, and, today, user @DOSnotCompute posted a similar experience.

I had a couple more thoughts, so thought should post them here (FUCK! It ended up being too fucking long! sorry!)

So I was watching the making of mortal kombat 3 on yt, which was pretty amazing btw because I got to see the actors of the sprites in game which were engraved in my and thousands of others kids minds.

Anyhow, the creators of the series, John Tobias and Ed Boon, were interviewed and what not. And it hit me that while both were the designers, John was the main artist and Ed was the programmer (at least for MK1). Another game that comes to mind Super Meat Boy, and I bet hundreds of others did the same.

And it got me thinking, maybe that's my problem, I just need an artist.

And I think the reason why I never thought of that is because of this idea that graphics don't matter.

"you don't need an artist. You don't need graphics. The most important thing is the gameplay."

What a load of shit.
A lot of people believe that because they got tired of polished AAA games with automatic and predictible gameplay.

People started parrotting this knee jerk of a conclusion since then.

It's dumb. Imagine if Infiminer, one of the games Minecraft was based on, which btw looks terrible, had all the same features Minecraft had.
I would still not touch that shit with a pole.

Graphics ARE important. Games are on the VISUAL medium.
That doesn't mean you're sucking Sony's dick on every AAA release or that every game should be made with UnreUnityCocksReloadedEngine.

Some level of visual craft is required for a game ro be considered such.

(btw, I think most of you guys here get this, not trying to pander, just that I want to make it clear that I'm not accusing this community of being guilty of this)

If a game looks bad (given, bad can be subjective), if it gives the impression that it wasn't seriously made, then you kinda lower your expectations.

People get hyped on games that look good, because it means that the game could be good. Games that look unoriginal or terrible won't get played, wether they're good or not. And I think it's a reasonable reaction.

How many times did I hear things like "Look at x video game from the 90s, the graphics are terrible but it's fun as hell".

That is an absurd statement. The level of production some NES games went through is insane. We're talking millions of dollars for games that today might look primitive.

The graphics weren't shit back then, and even today you could say that they are simpler but also of excellent craftsmanship.

I'm not into creating art, I hate it in fact because you can't quantify the success of produced art.

So, duh, find an artist. Ok, how? This is the part where I have no fucking idea how.

You start spamming shit like "I need an artist" online? I dunno, something for another post I guess.

I guess the most healthy thing I could do is making demos that might look like shit just to get experience so that when I get to find an artist, I have practice already.

Me: "hey we should do this new project in react!"
Boss: "no he barrier to entry is to tough for our team"

Boss talks to past employee(which he had to let go because he was a TERRIBLE developer who now works for facebook....) about new project, past employee recommends react....

Team is now going to work on a new project written with react......

I have been a frontender for a long time. I recently showed interest in backend development, and said to my boss that that is what I would like to pursue. He said that was never going to happen and I would only be a frontender in this company.

A lot of horrible things happened, some of the Lead Developers bailed and another developer flatly out committed industrial spionage on the company.

Then because of shortage of staff, gave me backend tasks, which all I completed within deadlines with few exceptions of course.

My project manager was very impressed about it.

Then I noticed the project management didn't concern themselves with ongoing projects, they became more focused on customer support and management of unhacking etc.

I noticed a wide gap that made it so all projects went past due the time because lack of coordination and planning

I stepped in because I was annoyed that this was common practice in the company.

While my two bosses were on vacation, they nominated me to be the "boss" of the company.

I earn close to minimum wage, and I felt this wasn't fair if I was to continue to do what I have done. So when our boss called us into a meeting and he said that he was going to move slowly away from the company, he said we should keep the reins of the company.

I didn't say much then, because I didn't feel like taking on so much responsibility I knew I wasn't to gain anything from more than knowledge.

I confronted him today and told him how I have felt throughout a long time. He basically said I hadn't proven myself and because of my young age, I didn't deserve to have more right now.

I was annoyed, he said he expected the same from every coworker and that I wasnt special or unique and that I could easily be replaced.

Not to mention I never got to finish a sentence without him interupting me or raising his voice to deafen out mine.

Have you ever had this experience and how did you feel? I feel terrible to be honest..

I wish this weren’t me, but it is. I’m terrible at my job.

I am participating in a project i called "Game of Thrones"

We pretend that we are a team, but in reality everyone hate one another.
It took only 3 weeks for Team Leader to turn everyone against him.
He is constantly fighting for power with Architect who is terrible at his job, and doesn't listen to his advice even if they are good.
We hate Team Leader because he is an tyrant, who is ruling from high tower his peasants. His favorite task is to create various rules that everyone has to accept. You have to write "I accept" in a chat but this is the only choice. You cannot disagree.

Moreover there are developers from client side. They "committed" current project which is full of bugs and generally doesn't work. I don't know why they are still working there, but I presume every of them is working for 5+ years, so they are the only ones able to dig thru the spaghetti they made.
They constantly fight with us about the how code should be written, they commits are garbage but they are very peaky when it comes to ours PR.
They always drag our PR as long as they can. Even sometimes pointing they mistakes as ours.

Caught a co-worker's gigantic fuck up today – dude totally wiped important code off master with a terrible git rebase + git push.

Gave him the nicest earful I could muster, but I think this is one of those times where I'm allowed to be royally pissed.

Fuck this day!
Like really fuck it!
I have one of the most terrible crunch-time i ever experienced.
I’v been working 12+ hours every day with an ever-changing project timeline.
It started simple, we made a timeline, it was risky even then but it was realistic, we started working immideatly, everything looked good then a few days in BOOM! Actually our project management completely forgot client B’s projects soo we need to do that too with the same fucking deadline!!! (About 10x more work in waay less time)
Then this morning i got an email from the graphics team that we need to document our design process RIGHT FUCKING NOW! Because management wants documentations, in the middle of a fucking crunch-time.
Today it almost got physical with my project manager, i told him that he is not a programmer, i dont fucking care about his shit, just fuck off and let me work because we won’t be ready based on his unrealistic bs.
I feel like completely fucked over, like we were told 2 days before deadline that the whole company and people’s jobs depends on us now because if we wont finish this clients won’t pay.
WE ARE TWO PROGRAMMERS for studio of 10-12 people!!!
Soo i’w been thinking about getting the fuck out of here ASAP, i got an offer from a pretty big international gamedev company just what i needed, i already did their test before all of this, i passed A+.
We scheduled a skype interview for today. I had completely no time to prepare or chill off, just got out of the office, got into a starbucks and i’m interviewing. No time to even check my mic or internet, the call was so shit i could not hear anything, they neither because the plaza was loud af. Meanwhile im nervous about work, about the interview, about can they hear me at all because of the noise. I fucked it up. BIG time! I was so done i could not reverse a fucking string in c++ or explain what is a signed int!!!
Needless to say they said no.
Need time to think about it or realize what happened? Nice dreams. Back to the office and continue working.
I can’t do this anymore. My girlfriend came for me and took me home at 10pm but all i could do was stare at the floor on the subway. I don’t want people to lose their jobs but i just phisically can’t do this anymore.
Meanwhile any time i talk to my project manager about being tired he says like “hshshsbsb i have 60 hours in the last 4 days i got the worst part, i would be grateful in your place..” like fuck off dude, i dont give fuck about how you feel about this. This is not okay for me, you did this to the project, your fucking job is to manage it! I have one day off before going back to this, i have completely no idea what to do now...

[ps: this is not Nemesys. They did not let me work on my own stuff because i would be a competitor, so i left.]

After 2 years at the uni with 6 programming courses, I stopped studying and started working.

So I kinda left with some expectation or demand for some level of standard, not the highest, but at least not expecting diarrea dog shit level of quality.

On my first jobs, I was pretty shocked with their outdated technologies, terrible workflows, insanely unsafe setups and vomit inducing management. I thought "this isn't normal, this shouldn't be happening"

After being for a week on devrant, I now think the opposite is not normal.

Websites that show a notification dot the first time I visit with zero interaction from my end: I hope you die. This is terrible exploitation of UX, and unless I really need something, I'm leaving the site within seconds.

!dev

I have a couple of thoughts about social justice controversies from these last years.

I think it's hard to have a good opinion about these events for several reasons.

One reason is that finding good information in 2019 is very hard.

Revenue based sites (thus unneutral) dominate the search results. You search about something and you find thousands of sites basically saying the same thing (because they copy each other).

That's why the existence of a free and open search engine is so important, so it's easier to find neutral hence good information on which to base your opinions, but they are prohibitively big for small groups to build.

Another reason is that controversies generate shock and shock curtails rational thinking. Maybe that's how the primitive brain works?

I'm not much of a scholar to feel confident to say that, but it's so recurrent that it's not too much of a wild guess.

When a controversy happens, a natural reaction is to pick a side. This means that:
a) we assume that there are only 2 sides, and
b) we must pick one of them

So, maybe the human is a bad politician by nature?

Also, because of the shock controversies generate, peaceful dialogue is very rare.

I have yet to see peaceful dialogue online about what patriarchy means to feminists and a lot of other terms they use.

I don't care much about feminists that vandalize or interrupt talks (yelling over someone else is abuse in my opinion).

But for the rest of them, I think discussing their ideas would be good.

I say this because most feminist discourse I see online is not open. Or maybe there are such instances but the web is so big that it's hard to find such instances.

I think some part of the modern feminist doctrine is bullshit, and some part is true.

I for one hate when some men I know in life expect their wives to be their cooks+cleaners (unless they want to do that, willingly). Personally, I'd encourage my wife to get a job (rightfully so, not just to meet some minority quota in some company).

I don't mind either calling a trans person the pronoun she wants.

But other ideas are awful, like the idea that meritocracy is patriarchy, so you need to force minorities to meet a proportionate quota. That's terrible reasoning.

Or the excessive self appreciation culture, like saying to yourself "you are pretty, you are beautiful, you are perfect". I think that grows arrogance and black-or-white thinking.

And some other ideas as well.

I guess the same you can say about any doctrine with different degrees. Some part is bullshit, some part isn't.

Some right wing people hate everyone who isn't white by default, but some want to have more immigration control.

I sure don't like the experiment of separating children from families like the current us govt did, but I wouldn't be happy either to know that by '99 50% of gangs members in the us were hispanic.

With this, I'm not going to say "embrace everyone's ideas" like an idiot. I hate when people do that. It's a stupid and weak reaction to radicalism.

In fact I think the way you fight radicalism and bad doctrines is that you listen to them and maintain good dialogue and counterargue in a respectful but insightful manner.

Making snide remarks, insulting or trolling won't change anyone's mind. That is just throwing fire to the fire.

In fact, when someone gets harassed because of something they believe in, usually it results in even more adherence to their beliefs, because of the usual assumption that success or goodness is full of strife.

So by telling a "sjw" or kkk member that they are idiots over twitter, you are in fact making them stronger believers in their doctrine.

Think of Daryl Davis, a black guy that made 200 members leave the kkk. How? He didn't tell them they were assholes, he somehow made friends with them.

I feel bad now because I've been trolling new devrant users a lot because of how they worsen the quality of the site, but maybe I should tell them that they are ruining the site somehow in a nice way and maybe they'll listen? I dunno...

Must nearly every recently-made piece of software be terrible?

Firefox runs terribly slowly on a four-core 1.6GHz processor when given eight (8) gigabytes of RAM. Discord's user interface is awfully slow and uses unnecessary animations. Google's stuff is just falling apart; a toaster notification regarding MRO stock was recently pushed such that some markup elements of this notification were visible in the notification, the download links which are generated by Google Drive have sometimes returned error 404, and Google's software is overall sluggish and somewhat unstable. Today, an Android phone failed to update the Google Drive application... and failed to return a meaningful error message. Comprehensive manuals appear to be increasingly often not provided. Microsoft began to digest Windows after Windows XP was released.

Laziness is not virtuous.

For all computer programs, a computer program should be written such that this computer program performs well on reasonably terrible hardware... and kept simple. The UNIX philosophy is woefully underappreciated.

Why is every company so BAD at working with spaces in passwords? Just trying to setup Hulu on my PS4, apparently I forgot my password? No, my password had a space in it. So maybe Hulu's just one of those companies that doesn't allow spaces in passwords? Wait no, I can log in with no problems on my Switch or PC with the space. It's just SPECIFICALLY the PS4 app that doesn't allow spaces. Cool cool cool.

Like, am I missing something? Is there some reason it's harder to hash than other characters? It's just an ASCII character, it's not like I'm copy/pasting in some fringe unicode shit. Some companies straight up ban it. Some like Amazon don't recognize it as a special character, while demanding I use a special character. Why is this so terrible?

This is just a bunch of things I needed to get out that I’ve been holding in for a while now.

Recently I’ve found myself In this state where I feel so depressed, lazy, and just pressured to program in general. I feel like it comes from me dismissing my abilities a lot of the time and I get demotivated to do stuff but at the same time when I do sit down and code I get distracted so easily, I can get work done but I just feel like I’m everywhere.

I want to apply for positions but I’m in this duality where I both feel like I can or can’t do it, I feel like wherever I apply to will not be accepting to people that don’t have a big degree or a ton of work experience and that I’ll get fucked on it. I’m fucking anxious that if I do get a job they will be like “hey fucking do X” and I will have no fucking clue how to even do X, and I’ve had people tell me that they know for a fact I can do it but I still fucking can’t believe it because I just completely doubt myself because I have failed at things like learning certain frameworks or failing to make the things I want and having to turn to simpler projects first because I’m too overwhelmed by the scale and I didn’t do any thinking about it before hand.

I don’t know if I’m making sense at all, I always write out rants like this and I always just erase them because I fucking hate whining like this but I need to let it out before I go more crazy I’ve been holding so much in for a long time now and it’s not been good.

I just over all feel terrible, anxious, and unproductive and I want it to stop.

How do you deal with someone like this?

I've got this dev at my workplace that is terrible to work with, he's 2 main reasons why I say this:
1. He has no clue about team work, every piece of code he writes is written as if he is the only person that has to ever touch that
2. He's overtly protective and opinionated on things that make no sense, they're non standard "rules" that he sets and enforces by replacing others code with his own (often times you see quite large PRs and after inspection you realize he rewrote parts of code to follow his style). These "rules" also take up a really long time to follow and would make any actually experienced developer question this guy's knowledge, one example of this is where he repeats the same code over multiple components for "encapsulation reasons" and God forbid you create a global helper of some sort, he'll straight up remove it the next chance he gets. Another example is that all his components or utilities live inside 1 base directory, so you have roughly 300+ components in a /components directory, all with non standard names so you can't tell which is related to which.

I hate working with this person, it's annoying and it also sucks because he's sort of a more "senior" Dev so managers take his side most of the time.

The single most annoying thing about working with Microsoft is how they, at one point, decided to wipe 99% of their articles and downloads on their site. But instead of updating it in their OWN FUCKING OS, they just leave links to the broken pages in their help system. The second problem then arises when you realise that instead of giving you an error page, it automatically redirects you to the default page.
But on top of wiping their site, not updating windows to reflect those changes, and having a terrible site design, they have also decided that it would be best to keep the pages that once we're, online. This means that they will still show up in search engines, without any content being there.

Add to that the fact that their support team is incompetent to an insane degree, and often doesn't know what they're talking about. This has caused me so much frustration over the last few days.

Dear Microsoft, please get your act together and fix your shitty website.
Greetings,
A pissed of customer who paid money for your shitty services

I got VB script blocked from all the computes in high school

I had a laptop to do my work in class on (my handwriting is terrible, dyslexia and other things) and I was playing around with VB script making a little text adventure game with dialog boxes because I was bored, it got quite long and I was happy with it but then one day when I tried to open the file it said the network administrator had blocked this type of file from being opened... Spoilsports

MTP is utter garbage and belongs to the technological hall of shame.

MTP (media transfer protocol, or, more accurately, MOST TERRIBLE PROTOCOL) sometimes spontaneously stops responding, causing Windows Explorer to show its green placebo progress bar inside the file path bar which never reaches the end, and sometimes to whiningly show "(not responding)" with that white layer of mist fading in. Sometimes lists files' dates as 1970-01-01 (which is the Unix epoch), sometimes shows former names of folders prior to being renamed, even after refreshing. I refer to them as "ghost folders". As well known, large directories load extremely slowly in MTP. A directory listing with one thousand files could take well over a minute to load. On mass storage and FTP? Three seconds at most. Sometimes, new files are not even listed until rebooting the smartphone!

Arguably, MTP "has" no bugs. It IS a bug. There is so much more wrong with it that it does not even fit into one post. Therefore it has to be expanded into the comments.

When moving files within an MTP device, MTP does not directly move the selected files, but creates a copy and then deletes the source file, causing both needless wear on the mobile device' flash memory and the loss of files' original date and time attribute. Sometimes, the simple act of renaming a file causes Windows Explorer to stop responding until unplugging the MTP device. It actually once unfreezed after more than half an hour where I did something else in the meantime, but come on, who likes to wait that long? Thankfully, this has not happened to me on Linux file managers such as Nemo yet.

When moving files out using MTP, Windows Explorer does not move and delete each selected file individually, but only deletes the whole selection after finishing the transfer. This means that if the process crashes, no space has been freed on the MTP device (usually a smartphone), and one will have to carefully sort out a mess of duplicates. Linux file managers thankfully delete the source files individually.

Also, for each file transferred from an MTP device onto a mass storage device, Windows has the strange behaviour of briefly creating a file on the target device with the size of the entire selection. It does not actually write that amount of data for each file, since it couldn't do so in this short time, but the current file is listed with that size in Windows Explorer. You can test this by refreshing the target directory shortly after starting a file transfer of multiple selected files originating from an MTP device. For example, when copying or moving out 01.MP4 to 10.MP4, while 01.MP4 is being written, it is listed with the file size of all 01.MP4 to 10.MP4 combined, on the target device, and the file actually exists with that size on the file system for a brief moment. The same happens with each file of the selection. This means that the target device needs almost twice the free space as the selection of files on the source MTP device to be able to accept the incoming files, since the last file, 10.MP4 in this example, temporarily has the total size of 01.MP4 to 10.MP4. This strange behaviour has been on Windows since at least Windows 7, presumably since Microsoft implemented MTP, and has still not been changed. Perhaps the goal is to reserve space on the target device? However, it reserves far too much space.

When transfering from MTP to a UDF file system, sometimes it fails to transfer ZIP files, and only copies the first few bytes. 208 or 74 bytes in my testing.

When transfering several thousand files, Windows Explorer also sometimes decides to quit and restart in midst of the transfer. Also, I sometimes move files out by loading a part of the directory listing in Windows Explorer and then hitting "Esc" because it would take too long to load the entire directory listing. It actually once assigned the wrong file names, which I noticed since file naming conflicts would occur where the source and target files with the same names would have different sizes and time stamps. Both files were intact, but the target file had the name of a different file. You'd think they would figure something like this out after two decades, but no. On Linux, the MTP directory listing is only shown after it is loaded in entirety. However, if the directory has too many files, it fails with an "libmtp: couldn't get object handles" error without listing anything.

Sometimes, a folder appears empty until refreshing one more time. Sometimes, copying a folder out causes a blank folder to be copied to the target. This is why on MTP, only a selection of files and never folders should be moved out, due to the risk of the folder being deleted without everything having been transferred completely.

(continued below)

Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

Any idea how to make a fan in an HP laptop spin at lower temperatures? The fan in my Pavilion dm-1 only starts spinning when CPU reaches 75°C and enters full speed when the GPU also becomes 75°C. Which is strange because this CPU and GPU are one and the same thing.. an APU. And overheating freezes often happen at around 75-80°C.. which isn't too much of a headroom really. I'd rather have it kick in at 50-60°C already, but would like to avoid using the power of the soldering iron for it.. I've already lost a fan to that previously (current one is a spare part from AliExpress). Granted, my soldering experience was much less back then.. nowadays I can probably even solder 1206 SMD packages comfortably. But I don't want to risk it, and I've got experience with custom kernels anyway.. are there any fan speed governors in the kernel that you know of?

FWIW, fancontrol doesn't seem to be supported on this laptop, and neither is pwmconfig. Perhaps I'll have to stick to the electronics method after all? Given that it's just a 5V fan, I guess that I could feed it power by tapping some power from a USB rail and controlling its speed from an ATtiny85.. but inside the laptop there isn't enough space for that and I don't feel like freeing this hardware out of its laptop chassis yet (though that is on the list). Either way running at 60°C under no load is terrible.. some HP certified enganeering "feature" I guess...

android studio is TERRIBLE. why cant they just make a fucking good linux installer? they're a fucking half trillion dollars company and can't get their shit together. its terribly unprofessional, and makes vim look like a god. maybe not all of us has have access to nasa's supercomputer and don't have a month for it to start.

here's a story about the installation of android studio on a (fairly high-end) chromebook running gallium:

I went to the website, which by the way could tell I was on linux but still automatically showed me the windows instructions, and downloaded android studio, 1.2 gb for fucks sake! I have a 16 gb hard drive! then it installed, and I closed it, because I was gonna use it later. I had a problem with it the first time, so I reinstalled, and halfway through the installation, IT DECIDED IT NEEDED SUPERUSER PRIVELEGES. fuck that. I restarted the installer, with sudo, and it took about switch as long this time. then, it made me redownload the sdk and all that other bloatware EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE INSTALLED IN SEPARATE FOLDERS AND ALREADY DOWNLOADED. jesus christ, google.

I've really struggled to make friends with people who code... and it's been absolutely frustrating. Does everyone in this industry have a god complex or something? Everyone I try to make friends with ends up being super narcissistic and self obsessed it's crazy. One of them wanted to be my mentor a while back, and we still talk occasionally, but after getting to know him I decided I didn't want to learn from him. It turns out he only mentors people to showboat his greatness and claim later that all their success is directly his doing. I decided I wasn't going to be one of those people and I only ever had 2 sessions from him. One of the best choices I've ever made. But I've found a lot of people who are programmers tend to be a lot like him. A lot of them I talk to will hit me up to brag about themselves or what they've done. But none ever ask what's been up with me or how my journey is doing? Is this just a normal thing in this industry or am I just meeting terrible people. It's made me appreciate my slightly dumber friends, cause at least they care about me and it shows.

More a rant than anything, but genuinely curious if anyone else has this issue... I'm starting my bootcamp soon and I'm hoping to make friends but I'm so concerned about this it's kind of giving me anxiety.

It's interesting to me... a lot of the rants I see here are all like "just started this new job and this place is SO fucked". Talking about how there's no process, no source control, terrible code, etc.

I say it's interesting because most of the time the thought that goes through my head is "that sounds fun as hell!"

Like, spend as many years at a place as I have, a place where there's SO much process and SO many controls and all of that... you know, the whole "big enterprise" mindset... and the idea of being able to come in to a place that's kind of wild west and actually work to FIX the place, to have freedom to change direction and innovate and not be locked in to all sorts of rules, is kind of exciting.

(you know, assuming it's a place and a position where that's possible at all... but at this point in my career, I'd only take a position where I had that kind of authority from the start, and as long as I have the authority then I'm happy to take on the responsibility and I'm up for the challenge)

I did a site for a hotel many years ago. They recently had it redone as a Turdpress site, it was terrible, I have just checked today and it redirects to a facebook page. Wondering if this is a trend that I am not aware of. The facebook page, however doesn’t sell the hotel like the website does/can.

Compiling software on Linux:

Python interpreter? Easy peasy, just some dependencies here and there. Make does a good job.

Linux kernel? Piece of cake, 20 years of development will be freshly served on your machine after one hour compiling (I have a pretty powerful computer).

Tensorflow? Fuck this shit I am outta.

What is your story with self-built software? Which piece of code has the most terrible dependency hell?

I almost died of hypothermia as a kid. My drunk grandpa went out to drink even more with his friends, forgetting about me and leaving the stroller with me sleeping out there on the street. It was negative forty-two degrees Celsius. I was one year old.
I made it, but developed an awful pneumonia. By some kind of miracle, I made it again, but at the expense of becoming a really weak kid. I had two more pneumonias during high school, plus one case of sinusitis.
Told my grandma I got ear pain in the morning. We went to our local clinic. The doctor there said I have to be hospitalized RIGHT NOW, otherwise it might turn into a life-threatening meningitis. By the time we’re in the hospital, the pain is already unbearable. My vision becomes blurry and dark, I hear my pulse in my head, I lose the sense of time. At that point I’m laying on the hospital bed, motionless, quietly sobbing while the terrible pain is swallowing me, a tiny kid, whole.
I’ll never forget the sound of a sinusitis needle crushing through a porous bone inside my head. A glass worth of pus rushing out. The pain immediately going away.
All that because of one man addicted to alcohol. This is why I don’t drink.

My two cent: Java is fucking terrible for computer science. Why the fuck would you teach somebody such a verbose language with so many unwritten rules?

If you really want your students to learn about computer, why not C? Java has no pointer, no passed by reference, no memory management, a lots of obscure classes structure and design pattern, this shit is garbage. The student will almost never has contact with the compiler, many don't even know of existence of a compiler.

Java is so enterprise focused and just fucked up for educating purpose. And I say it as somebody who (still) uses it as main language.

If you want your students to be productive and learn about software engineering, why not Python? Things are simple in Python can can be done way easier without students becoming code monkeys (assuming they don't use for each task a whole library). I mean java takes who god damn class and an explicitly declared entry point which is btw. fucking verbose to print something into the console.

Fuck Java.

Biggest mistake I've made in my life is assuming other people knew more than me and asking for advice and integrating their advice. I suffered many years being tortured by terrible advice that had no actual relation or usefulness in reality but caused me stress to have to follow, and I was too inexperienced to know any of this.

The other problem with bad advice is; how do you know it's bad advice? If you got the advice when you were naive, and you followed it, never strayed from it, you will still be naive in that area, because of the dutifulness by which you stuck to that advice. You literally imprison yourself, forever, especially if you are very good at putting effort in and have high conscientiousness, reliability. You will never know you were wrong.

I used to think my first relationship was awful. I went through so much and rather it served as a trigger for my childhood trauma as well.

Little did I know that it would be the best the thing that could happen to me. I grew so much and every next woman I met, I realised how fucking amazing my ex is. God I miss her terribly.

But what happened with my recent fuck up, I am devastated. This toxic women brought out the worst in me. I have never been so hateful against myself or anyone else in the world.

I was love bombed and walked into a trap. I quit as soon as I realised what it was.

My values were comprised. My integrity was put to test. My trust was intentionally broken. During the initial days, she tactically identified my vulnerabilities and insecurities. Then used to sadistically trigger me as often as she can and sit there and watch me in suffer pain.

It led me to self harm and being suicidal.

I am so badly wounded that even after few weeks, I am still discovering all the wounds. It will surely take some time along with external support to build a healing environment for myself and overcome this damage.

I am very angry, terribly hurt, lost and confused. This shit developed a phobia in me. I cannot trust anyone anymore. I constantly live in fear of being hurt (physical, mental, and emotional). I am paranoid of that stalker.

I don't think I'll ever be able to start and build a healthy relationship with anyone. I used to be sooooo fucking strong emotionally and mentally. But now not only my trauma relapsed but I got more issues within me.

I really want to live a free, healthy, happy and a fulfilled life. I don't know when time will heal this but right now, I am in terrible pain and hate myself a lot.

The new CTO promised us better coffee in his introduction meeting. Honestly felt pretty trivial and part of his used car salesman pitch to us.

A month goes buy and he replaces our shitty drip Starbucks breakfast blend coffee with ... Starbucks coffee machines. I shit you not these things have touch screens on them. So I tried two cups of each bean type and ... this stuff is really really bad. It's literally worse than the drip brew. It's so fucking terrible I have trouble finishing a cup.

God damn it!

Why WordPress is not very good:
I wrote a quick 230 line python script that uses the power of urllib, ebooklib and 12 regular expressions that would make any italian proud to download webnovels from virlyce.com and turn them into .epub files for me.
The chapters are all individual WordPress pages, and after sequentially downloading only 202 of them I got an internal server error.
Why, WordPress?

Of course, I saw this coming and put mitmproxy to good use caching everything, so even though my python script with terrible error handling crashed I don't have to do it all again (yay)

This is why i could NEVER work a helpdesk job - yesterday corporate head office sent out a company wide email, including the helpdesk address. Helpdesk automatically creates a ticket for any emails, attaching the original email for reference. This morning I see at least 10 helpdesk tix, emailed to me because i was on the original email chain, created by dumb-dumbs saying things like "all these emails must be a computer glitch" "I do not require assistance" without realizing if they just stopped replying they would stop getting the emails!

Helpdesk is SWAMPED with legitimate work but lately theyve had to deal with things like this, I feel terrible for them

tl;dr version: I now hate Windows​.

<background>
I installed​ Ubuntu in dual boot on my PC and I was sceptical.
After one month everything is working perfectly. I'm loving this OS although I still am not an expert, and I doubt I'll ever go back to Windows.
</background>

Now. Today at school we were drawing using a CAD software and, for no reason at all, Windows crashed. This is not a terrible thing, as I usually save often, but this time it also corrupted the file and I had to start from scratch again!

Why Windows, why?

So I'm coming out of one that has a focus on this stack (JS [JQuery after weeks of Vanilla JS drilling in our heads, React], Java, MySQL, Python [Django, Bottle], HTML/CSS, and a few web security concepts (XSS, SQL injections).

The whole course has been 4 months learning, 3 weeks working on a final project. Next week is the presentation, so I think I can safely comment on the course.

We moved fast, but that's to be expected. Lecture in the mornings, exercises in the afternoons, assignments due at the beginning of each week. Constantly working towards it and improving. I have been working pretty hard. We were given some help, but had to get a lot of answers online (based God StackOverflow), but that's part of it.

We touched on some concepts like inheritance in JS, Python and Java, OOP and to be open to concepts we don't know so we should be thirsty for that knowledge.

In my off time, I've begun texting myself Node and really trying to double down on React because it seems useful. I realized I was more drawn to the backend, but I was comfortable in front end as well. (Just don't ask me to design anything, my eye for aesthetics/CSS sorcery is terrible.)

The overall experience has been pretty mixed, but we were mostly unsatisfied. We weren't given then help we were promised. The explanations weren't exactly crystal clear, so we would have to teach ourselves and each other quite a bit. We worked together a lot. Some people really fell behind, some caught up, some flew ahead and thrived. (I'm somewhere between caught up and thrived, I recognize where I stand.)

I'm happy I did a bootcamp, they aren't miracle programs, but they at least kick you into place that you are learning and need to continue to learn. (Just kinda wish I had done a different one.)

Feel free to ask about anything concerning it!

So we work on a Vmware network. And besides the terrible network lag. The specs of that VM is one core (Possibly one thread of a xeon core) and 3 GB RAM.

What do we do on it?
Develop heavy ass java GUI applications on eclipse. It lags in every fucking task. Can't even use latest versions of browsers because the VM is a fucking snail ass piece of shit!

So, in the team meeting I proposed to my manager, Hey our productivity is down because of this POS VM. Please raise the specs!.

He said mere words won't help. He needs proof.

Oh, you need proof ? Sure. I coded up a script that all of my team ran for a week. That generates a CSV with CPU usage, mem left, time - every 10 min. I use this data to show some motherfucking Graphs because apparently all they understand is graphs and shit.

So there you go. Have your proof! Now give me the specs I need to fucking work!

My company's process basically boils down to this:
-Hour long meeting to open an issue.
-5 lines of comments.
-Update three documents.
-5 days for a peer review.
-40 bitchy comments about how everything you do and love is terrible.

For a one line code change to prevent a show stopping exception.

Probably had my worst half-week ever this week.

Customer's CRM system, the read and edit masks just...stopped existing on last week friday. CRM fell back on some default masks for the dataset. No way to create new masks directly without putting the whole system upside down.
We couldn't do anything anyway because they reported the issue literally as we all were about to leave for weekend and our boss was like "Ah nah, well do it next week."
Our brains were already fried anyway...
I mail the reporter that we've registered their issue, will investigate and report back ASAP once we've got news.

Monday rolls around, I'm whacking my head against their system trying to figure the fuck out, what went wrong and how to solve it, I come up empty; Not that terrible since the masks only stopped existing in the webclient version of the system and they can still use the windows client, so they can still work.

Tuesday rolls around, I'm at an on site training for an ERP system with my boss at a remote company. Get an email in midst of the training, I was doing protocol.
Guy from the afflicted company goes and tells me that the issue has somehow spread to his colleague and him...IN THE WINDOWS CLIENT.

I'm fucking flabbergasted, so to speak, since the masks for the windows client and the web client are totally isolated from one another.
After we're back at our company, I investigate, less efficiently this time because my brain got fried at the training. I come up empty again.

NOW TODAY: Discuss further proceedings with my boss, he's not pissed at me or anything, just to say, but we're both worried, obviously.

Then at 10:20, a guy from the afflicted company mails me in an annoyed tone that the masks are still broken.

11:00, we figure out a workaround so the windows client users can at least work again, albeit limited.

11:10, I mail the guy, telling him that although we're still not able to fully work everything out and are still investigating, we've made a workaround so they can at least work again.

11:20, the guy mails me in a pissed tone around the lines of "This is very very important and must be fixed ASAP or else we'll not be able to work at all [...]"
And I think like "Dude I literally just told you like 8 minutes ago that there's are workaround so you'll be able to at least work again..."

Forward the mail to boss, we meet up quickly to discuss how in God's name we can deescalate this mfer.

11:31, the guy mails me again, all apologetically this time "Stop! All is good, I just now fully read you mail, thanks for implementing the workaround, nothing will come to a standstill [...]"

BRUH CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ BEFORE ESCALATING SHIT

Fuck customers. Dumb fucking cretins unable to fucking read.

The issue is still unresolved. Support of the CRM software lets us sit on our collective asses and wait.

There is no such thing as stable software, it's a myth.

Every corporate software is like an ever-decaying semi-corpse of a brain dead patient slowly getting worse and worse but not fucking dying.

Rant over.

I'm really into coding now for half a year. I really love that kinda flow when there pop up no errors and you work yourself through the code writing using trial and error. It's really addicting and the perfect evening.
But here comes my question: There are sometimes unsolvable errors for me (still not figuring out how to use firebase properly 😞). Is this stuff going to be fewer as I advance in coding, or am I just terrible at googling? To other beginners: Do you have often errors to that feel unsolvable for you?

Why the hell is JS so terrible, and why do so many people resort to using is as a back end. So many packages, so many outdated dependencies. My coworkers and friends have heard me rant about my constant frustration with this terrible setup.

I understand the need for dynamic html but why have we bastardized this language to the extent we have.

Keep your projects up to date, it saves people a lot of trouble in the future.

Client contacts our company that his site is down, we do some investigating and the only way we can access the site is on a mobile phone. From the office computers the site never loads and times out. Since we don't host the site and I've never logged into it before I don't have a lot of details so I suggest they contact whoever hosts their site. This is where things get weird.

Client tells me that the site is hosted on someone's home server. I tell him that this is quite strange in 2018 and rather unlikely and ask if he was ever given access to the site to log in or if he has access to his domain registration, GoDaddy.

He says he doesn't understand any of this and would rather I just contact his current developer and figure it out with him. We agree that he needs to get access to his site so we are going to migrate it once I get access to it.

I email his current developer letting him know the client has put me in contact with him to troubleshoot the issues with the site. I ask him some standard questions like: where is the site hosted? Can you access it from a computer? Do you have some security measures in place to block certain IP ranges? Can you give me from access to get the files? Will you send me a backup of the site for me to load up on my server?

*2days pass*

Other dev: Tell me the account number and I'll transfer the domain.

Me: I'll have to get back to you on that once I talk to the client and set up his GoDaddy account since we believe the business owner should own their domain, not their developers. In the meantime you didn't answer any of the questions I asked. Transferring the domain won't get the site on my server so I still need the files.

*3 days pass*

OD: You are trying the wrong domain. The correct domain is [redacted].com I'll have my daughter send you the files when she gets in town. We will transfer the domain to you, the client will forget to pay and the site will go down and it'll be your fault.

Me: I appreciate your advice, but the client will own their domain. I'm trying to get the site online and you have no answered any of my questions. It's been a week now and you have not transferred the domain, you have not provided a copy of the site, you have not told me where the site is hosted. The client and I are both getting impatient at this point when will we receive a backup of the site and the transfer of the domain?

OD: Go fuck yourself, tell the client they can sue me.

If the client is that terrible, wouldn't you want to hand them off to anyone willing to take them? I have never understood why developers and agencies try to hold clients hostage by keeping their domain or website and refusing access. From what I can tell this is a freelance developer without a real company so a legal battle likely isn't going to go well since the domain is worthless to him as the copyright to the name is owned by the client. This isn't the first time we've had to help clients through this sort of thing.

Trigger warning:
Emotional !dev love life rant

I think this is not the right place to pour my heart out, but despite its more recent infights I still consider devRant to be a special community to me. And I guess if devRant is my goto place for support that's an issue. But maybe I just need to shout into a void because this is not about you solving this for me.

I have been in this relationship for ~6 years. My first great love. In the beginning, everything was perfect - a love story like from a cheesy movie. We've been through a lot to be together: Long distance, moving countries, a ton of bureaucracy (as she's from another country). So many memories.

It came as a surprise to me when she ended things. It really shouldn't have been. We've talked a lot about the reasons and I now see how much I've taken her for granted and neglected our relationship. I see now how I've been avoiding my problems and how I didn't work on my (mental and physical) health issues as good as I need to - not just for any relationship, but for myself. The regret/shame/guilt of not giving it 100% and of neglecting her weights heavily on me (besides the loss) and I am not sure what is worse.

Besides our relationship withering because of neglecting emotional needs, she also questioned our compability. We certainly have differences and different interests and we're both somewhat uncertain whether we really fit, if we ignore our history/emotions. It is actually a question that popped up in my head before sometimes, but I was too afraid to look into it for fear the answer is no. But here we are and ignoring that didn't help.

For now, we both need time to think about what we really want and whether this includes the other. We agreed that we need some distance to process the feelings. We still live in the same flat but for now she's staying with a friend most of the time and I'll also have a friend's place available soon. If in some time we both feel like we want to be together, we can date again - however she was also clear that she doesn't want to give any false hope and her current vision doesn't include me. If not, well have to hire a divorce lawyer. (Why you need a lawyer for that if both agree is beyond me.)

I am shattered. When it became clear to me that the relationship is over (and I ruined it), I got nauseous to the point that I threw up constantly for 6 hours. For the following 2 days I only cried and haven't eaten. Third day I started cleaning up the flat (long overdue!) - mostly for her tbh but I know it's good for myself, so better do the right thing with wrong motivation than sob all day -
talked to my psychiatrist and she brought some lunch which I could eat. Today (fourth day) she came over and we cooked lunch. I am still feeling terrible but the first days have been the worst I've ever felt and I've been trough quite a bit of (physical & chronic) pain - emotional pain hits different.

Let's see how this works out. In any case I now know very clear that I can't continue like before and need to work on my issues (for my own sake). I want be my best self, even if right now I don't have a lot of energy and am very depressed. I got an appointment with a therapist tomorrow - something I should have done years ago but I was overwhelmed with anxiety and analysis paralysis. I hope the future will be brighter and while I still wish to wake up from this nightmare and realize my faults without this breakup, I also know that I have to face reality.

PS: I do feel better now after writing this out. Thanks for listening, I guess.

The absolutely terrible and anti-customer "service" provided by Comcast should be illegal.

My bill went up $25 this month without any warning whatsoever, and all I get is their braindead AI they are training with customer voice data. So I shout jibberish into it until it connects me to a human.

I have actual choices where I live, so I'm going to cancel.

Remote work (for the software industry, at least) is PERFECT and I still haven't heard a single argument against it that could not be derived into one of the following explanations:
- the complainer is/has a terrible manager
- the complainer has a shitty house
- the complainer has a shitty family
- the complainer is a shitty person
Naturally I mean only real-adult healthy people who work in the software industry.

I will now list the complaints I have heard more often. All fit neatly in the categories above:
- "my family interrupts me a lot, require lots of attention and/or creates an environment I cannot work in" - in this case it is very irresponsible of the complainer to try and escape to an office. If the adults you live with cannot get by without you, how going to an office will help them? If you can't teach your children to behave, who will?

- "my house is noisy and/or uncomfortable" - move out! if you can go to the office, you can look for another place to live.

- "I need in person conversations to understand people / zoom meetings are a waste of time" - why? do you need the smell of other people to properly organize your thoughts? Yes, meetings are extra-shitty during the pandemic. But pandemics come and go and your terrible time management skills won't simply improve themselves. Learn to lead better meetings instead of blaming the medium.

- "I miss face-to-face interactions at work" - Those do not miss you. If you want to have personal conversations, do it *out of working hours* with consenting adults. If you want to have personal touch in work contexts, it is called "sexual harassment" and is a crime.

- "my employees / colleagues are not as effective without me breathing at their necks" - you are a terrible manager and leader if you can't inspire people in words only. Maybe even video.

My main point is, there is no argument against WFH. When people try to argue against it, they often actually mean "I don't like the pandemic". No shit. Life will be better after people stop dieing for breathing close to their friends and family. In the mean time, learn to organize your life instead of running away from it every day.

Have you ever been to love theatre? How many times? Have you ever seen a movie? How many?
Why so many more movies than live theatre? You think you would have liked the movies, and their price, more if it was live theatre? Would you have seen as many?
WFH is not perfect for everybody in the planet. But it sure is for the software industry.

That's it, where do I send the bill, to Microsoft? Orange highlight in image is my own. As in ownly way to see that something wasn't right. Oh but - Wait, I am on Linux, so I guess I will assume that I need to be on internet explorer to use anything on microsoft.com - is that on the site somewhere maybe? Cause it looks like hell when rendered from Chrome on Ubuntu. Yes I use Ubuntu while developing, eat it haters. FUCK.

This is ridiculous - I actually WANT to use Bing Web Search API. I actually TRIED giving up my email address and phone number to MS. If you fail the I'm not a robot, or if you pass it, who knows, it disappears and says something about being human. I'm human. Give me free API Key. Or shit, I'll pay. Client wants to use Bing so I am using BING GODDAMN YOU.

Why am I so mad? BECAUSE THIS. Oauth through github, great alternative since apparently I am not human according to microsoft. Common theme w them, amiright?

So yeah. Let them see all my githubs. Whatever. Just GO so I can RELAX. Rate limit fuck shit workaround dumb client requirements google can eat me. Whats this, I need to show my email publicly? Verification? Sure just go. But really MS, this looks terrible. If I boot up IE will it look any better? I doubt it but who knows I am not looking at MS CSS. I am going into my github, making it public. Then trying again. Then waiting. Then verifying my email is shown. Great it is hello everyone. COME ON MS. Send me an email. Do something.

I am trying to be patient, but after a few minutes, I revoke access. Must have been a glitch. Go through it again, with public email. Same ugly almost invisible message. Approaching a billable hour in which I made 0 progress. So, lets just see, NO EMAIL from MS, Yes it appears in my GitHub, but I have no way to log into MS. Email doesnt work. OAuth isn't picking it up I guess, I don't even care to think this through.

The whole point is, the error message was hard to discover, seems to be inaccurate, and I can't believe the IRONY or the STUPIDITY (me, me stupid. Me stupid thinking I could get working doing same dumb thing over and over like caveman and rock).

Longer rant made shorter, I cant come up with a single fucking way to get a free BING API Key. So forget it MS. Maybe you'll email me tomorrow. Maybe Github was pretending to be Gitlab for a few minutes.

Maybe I will send this image to my client and tell him "If we use Bing, get used to seeing hard to read error messages like this one". I mean that's why this is so frustrating anyhow - I thought the Google CSE worked FINE for us :/

Holy shit seriously: Fuck MSOffice. Fuck it right in the eyehole.

As desktop software, it's just brutally terrible. On my work mac, it's just sweaty garbage. The latest insult is that on the most recent update, msword stole the default file association from preview.

Libre isn't terrific, but at least it's closed when you close it. For that reason alone, it's orgasmic by comparison.

Because there's justice in the world, my job is not a document-centered one, so I have no real use at all for an office app, let alone the specific macros and formulae that the msoffice versions of these apps provide, so I couldn't give less of a shit about losing functionality.

The headline and main thrust of this rant is "fuck msoffice so hard that it dies of eye-fucking."

What the hell is wrong with me?

It was even less than maybe 2 months ago since I loved my job, had co-workers I happily called friends, wrote code I was proud of, and felt like I had a meaning and a place in the industry. I had plans for my future and everything was great.

But this entire week felt terrible. Everything was awful.
I despised every single word of those idiots I called friends.
Their craft - our craft - is a colossal and monumental failure; A sad joke, that insults more than it entertains.

I can't bring myself to program, not even to fuck around at home...

And I have no idea what to do now.

I sent money to a scammer 😔
They said it is a security deposit and I didn't think twice. I thought I was smarter than this but clearly I am not.
I got too greedy, lazy and desperate for money.
This is what happens when you isolate yourself from reality.
I feel terrible. 😣

So new job started.
Just for context- old company was shit.
Promised the world but.
No benefits.
Terrible project management.
High pressure.
But green field interesting work (except by now it’s a few years in so it’s a ‘browning’ field but I was on it from the start).

New company first impressions..
Seems a fantastic company.
True to their word they have money for tools.
Making time for personal development.
Much bigger development community/department.
Seems like the term are under far less pressure so far at least.

But a MASSIVE amount of tech debt.
People seem to want to do the right thing and they’re making time to try and deal with it.
But one or two are very opinionated as to how to deal with it.

So this could go either way and only time will tell I guess.
Trying not to over analyse every little thing they say but I’m hyper sensitive to it at the minute while in the early days.

As always the real challenge in IT is the people not the tech. I count myself as part of the problem, sure I will form some opinions and sharing them too.

There is a book that is supposed to be the best book on its subject... but I just have to say - This book is not a good book. It's a bad book. That's right. I know the author well, - but it's terrible and I just need to tell someone. Thank you for listening.

A certain person here on devRant was annoyed about my phone being named “Beyond”, seeing a screenshot of my settings.

What they said: “the name, beyond, reeks pretentiousness and arrogance, you say you’re better than other people”

What really happened: during one of my manic episodes, I discovered the band named Death Grips. Their music resonated with me and helped me to cope with my derealization. In one of their songs, I misheard lyrics, and heard the word “Veyon” that was never there in the first place. Upon my inner voice pronouncing it, as it usually happens to me, a brand-new universe appeared before me, where Veyon was a name of a megacorporation that exists in a shaky spacetime plane somewhere in India. If you want to go there, three outcomes are possible: you can actually come to their building that appears to be normal, with people working inside you can talk to, and no signs of trouble in sight. Or, you can try to walk to their building, but you will never reach it. GPS will show you slowing down gradually as you get closer, but to you, it would look like you’re just walking with your regular speed, as if nothing happened. Like a function trying to reach its asymptote, you’ll never come to your destination. The third outcome is by far the most interesting one. You will reach the building, but it will be abandoned, with doors scattered on the floors randomly, some of them will disappear after you walk in, rendering you missing in this universe. Oh, and floors are guarded by robots and turrets, and they are made by Grumman, the military aviation manufacturer. Yes, Grumman, not Northrop Grumman. This building in the third outcome originates from the spacetime plane where Northrop and Grumman never merged.

The whole thing raced through my mind in a millisecond. I liked it and decided to squat the name, but it was already taken by Veyon open source software (Virtual Eye On Networks).

In some time, I bought a new phone second-hand, and named it Veyon. The next day, I took it to shower with me. It turned out that the seller lied to me about it never being fixed. It was, and in the process its water resistance was compromised. So, this phone was damaged beyond repair the next day I bought it.

The same day, I went and bought the same phone model, but brand new, and in black, as I originally wanted. I was grateful for this opportunity that helped me escape the situation where I would've been using the phone of the colour I disliked just because I cheapen out. I know myself, and I would’ve been feeling uneasy every day, hesitant to sell it and get a new one because “nothing is wrong with it, quit being this picky, it’s just a colour”, but wait, don’t I deserve to make the colour a significant enough reason to switch the phone because I care about colour, especially if it’s me who’s paying the money? Did I make this money rightfully, or am I an impostor who gets paid because of intricate lies I tell? Do I actually tell them, or do I make that up to somehow convince "them" I'm innocent? Or do I try to get attention?

I’m terrible at dealing with that kind of mess, So, I was grateful.

The only thing left to do was to name my new phone. I decided not to name it “Veyon” again, just in case. So, I named it “Beyond”, as this word is probably what the actual song said.

The monstrosity of a story above is the usual thing for me to feel. I was really hurt by you telling me the name I chose was a display of pretentiousness. Do I deserve to be pretentious? I say yes, but my voice is shaking, as flashbacks of my awful mother abusing me come in the way.

You hurt me with that comment. Let’s meet? :)

So, let me preface this by saying I come from a backend (mostly c#) background.

The way React handles objects changing in state is horrendous. And if you decide to try using hooks, God help you.

I honestly don't know if it's Blazor or something else that will kill js, but something absolutely needs to. It is a dumb, terrible language. It has to go.

All that said, of course I'll go back to work on it tomorrow.

Sorry, js/react guys/gals. Just venting. I'm sure once I 'get it', it will make sense.

I am really stressed rn. I have terrible Imposter's Syndrome coupled with this being my 2nd year as a professional (bootcamp grad) and an extreme lack of insight and support from my company. WFH has only exacerbated it. Im on a 2-ish person team handling some ancient legacy code with no one ever willing to just throw me a fucking bone. My supe is actually on my team and makes up the "ish" part and has always told me to ask questions but when I do he gets pissed and reminds me of all the people who are working and super busy and dont have time to stop what they're doing and help me. Its my first job in tech and I just need to know if this is a consistent thing across the board bc im ready to fucking jump ship. My anxiety levels are through the roof and when I go over our backlog I look at every card and ask myself how tf Im going to grt it done bc Ive never seen any of it before. Initially I thought i landed a great workplace with complete autonomy but now I just dont know. My other teammate has a habit of being condescending, whether he realizes it or not and therefore I just feel like im out here alone trying to figure all this shit out. This sprung from a card ive been working on for 2+ months but cant resolve, finally I just came to the conclusion it was above what im currently capable of and he told me he's "disappointed Im just throwing in the towel" even though ive asked for help from senior devs. Idk what to do, he even told me there'd be cards I may hit a wall on when I first started but this just feels shitty. Ive had other things going on to including surviving a fucking hurricane, having a friend murdered, and having my dad die all within a few weeks time. I am absolutely stretched to my emotional limit, but I dont know if Im overreacting. Anyway, I just needed to vent to people who could understand, thanks for reading.

After I received my laser eye surgery, I knew it would become painful after the effect of anesthesia would decrease so I got painkillers in advance.

It was nimesulide.

Even in 2008 ISDB raised a concern about the liver damage and asked for it to be withdrawn worldwide, but I didn't knew it.

So the terrible pain started and I took the pill. Just. One. Pill.

This all started in like fifteen minutes. Eye pain won't go away, but it didn't mattered anymore as I felt really terrible. I never experienced that kind of feeling before and I don't even know how to describe it. It felt like a terrible sensation inside my stomach mixed with an urge to vomit. "This is probably what a liver failure feels like. This is it, I'm going do die here", I remember thinking about as I collapsed.

This whole incident led to an investigation about why the doctors "forgot" to give me proper eye anesthesia drops. This got several doctors fired.

This all got me really interested in how different medications work. I started casually reading popular medical literature and when my depression came, I was prepared, as much as you can even get prepared to a mental disorder.

The thing that probably nearly killed me helped me not to lose my sanity later.

Recently installed SonarQube and its been amazing to see the level of code quality (or lack thereof)

Some projects have 30 to 60 days of technical debt and I found a few files with a cyclomatic complexity over 100. I’m still learning what the “good” numbers should be.

Yesterday, couple of devs were very proud they were going to start reducing the numbers, they started with one of my solutions that had 5 minutes of technical debt. Yes, 5 minutes.

DevA: “OMG…look at this…it has a cyclomatic complexity of 11…that’s terrible. I thought we were supposed to be professional developers.”
DevB: “And take a look at this, he used the double-slash instead of a triple slash for comments. How does any of code even compile?!”
Me: “Maybe we should tweak some of those SonarQube rules so they make more sense to our code base. We’re never going to use unicode, so all those string culture warnings should go away and code comment formatting? Who cares? Be happy we have comments. I think we should also focus on the bigger fish in that pond. The CRM project is one of the biggest and has a lot of improvement opportunities.”
DevB: “There you go again, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions..ha ha”
DevA: “Yea, no kidding …hey…did you see the logger? OMG…the whole class is over 25 lines…we gotta split that up into smaller projects so it’s more manageable.”

It’s a good thing our revenue stream isn’t dependent on people getting work done.

Asked to do reporting on all of our workstations and servers patching compliance. Invited to team meeting with head administrator which should know where this data is stored and how to get to it. After five minutes can already tell this guy is all talk and has no clue about anything. To make matters worse he has a list of certifications and qualifications in his email signature. I figure out on my own where the data is, how to get access to it, and build reports which show just how terrible the head administrator is at patching and in general just useless. Roll forward two months, his boss comes and tells me useless admin has been let go and that I'll have a new admin to work with that actually knows stuff. HOW DO THESE PEOPLE GET HIRED!?

My job environment is either fucked up or am too young to understand what a job life is.
I was hired to intern for a startup having 2 main bosses/founders . one of them is mostly administrative and comes to office daily. He sets some tasks and i have to complete them, as soon as possible or sometimes till a deadline. He has little knowledge about the complexity of wotk so usually he says "just complete it as soon as possible so we could release it" but we haven't pushed any updates since i joined (of course i have completed some tasks, but they are just not pushed to the release version)

The other one , as i ranted previously is a completely different story.I think he is an elder bro or senior of the other boss,but he is just a superman: dealing with the distributers, commanding the hardware ppl, discussing with the othr boss, handling the server and most importantly the guy who wrote all the code i am working on. So he comes extremely rarely(1 or 2 days / week) , tries to communicate with me , but is immediately diverted by some other call/person and goes away.

The problem is : am feeling a little helpless. They give me tasks and i start working on them with excitement .( I don't believe myself to be a terrible beginner: i have been learning/working on android development for past 1 year, i know my things. And even if i don't, i know how to search/debug and produce results) . So as usual, i start and try to apply my skills / search for things i don't / try to understand his large,overwhelming and confusing codebase and at the end am stuck at some point where i don't understand what to do next. Sometimes its a bug which doesn't seems to fix, sometimes its a thing thats in the codebase but i couldn't find or sometimes it's just something i couldn't seem to understand why isn't it working. At that time, I only wish that boss to be here and look at what and how i have done, if its a correct approch and how can we together take it to completion (or simply wtf am i doing wrong, see my shit and tell me) .

But again, the tech boss is busy or wouldn't have time to understand my problem in our short , incomplete meetings. But he or the nontech boss will definitely have the time to ask the sttus of project and pressurise for the "deadline" .

Like today, i was so stuck at this fucking one line error that i couldn't detect that i just messaged him that am leaving for home 3 hours early. He came running and for the first time in history gave me a complete undisturbed time. It was such a small mistake, but i wasn't able to catch on my own. But when i told him, he immediately caught , changed a single line and the code started to work.

I am feeling irritated. Is this all a correct environment?

ios is such a fucking piece of shit os. it won't let you upgrade it unless you are on wifi, and even if you connect to wifi it will say "iphone will try to install this update later tonight". typing on the ios keyboard is terrible, and feels like i'm in 2011 again. it would have been much more usable if the good parts were not sacrificed to suit appearance and whoever is in charge of ios development didn't think that his way of using the iphone was the only true way of using a phone. i'm so pissed off because of the wifi thing gosh

P.S. i can't imagine someone coming from long time android use and saying "how fucking awesome!"

As a student I got involved in a project written by another student who wasn't working at the company for the time I started. It was a web based application written in plain JS and PHP. His attempt was really terrible and I had to rewrite almost everything. If I sum this up I deleted about 4k lines of code and replaced them with about 2k of my code. My attempt is scalable and it is much easier to build new functions and modules.

To fetch 100 users at once, i used JPA hibernate findAll() method. Simple fucking enough. I realized this shit is slow. Takes a while to fetch and 100 records aint even a lot!

This shit needs over 265 ms to fetch 100 users

About 75 ms to fetch 20 users

That shits terrible!

Then i wrote a custom JDBC class with custom SQL queries to fetch the exact same shit.

Now it fetched 100 users in 7 ms, 37x times faster for performance

I havent even optimized indexing or did shit. I just avoided using jpa hibernate

Someone explain this to me

The more i work dev stuff in web3 the more i realize how cancerous this space is. Shits terrible over here. Not only is it extremely difficult to program but the biggest.... Idk whats the best word to use, irritating? Annoying? Stressing? Degenerate? Biggest shit thats happening are scams scams and fucking scams. Honestly you never know who's legit and who's about to scam

A 16 year old kid rug pulled 6 nft collections and stole over 10 million dollars so far. He's even arguing on twitter publicly claiming he's the Batman

People are robbing everyone for millions of dollars

You've probably heard about Luna ponzi scheme that collapsed and the founder stole BILLIONS of dollars

And the worst part about all of this:

THERE ARE NO CONSEQUENCES! WTF?

So why the fuck should i work a job and try to be legit if i can scam degenerates for millions of dollars because there are no consequences??

i was about to talk about golang - but it can wait.

snapchat's discover section is TERRIBLE. the amount of BULLSHIT, INCORRECT INFORMATION, AND PURE IDIOCY IS MAKING IT TERRIBLE.

now, usually, i rant about mashable when i say it's terrible. AT LEAST WHEN MASHABLE WROTE ABOUT THIS THEY WERE CORRECT. but no, alas, my faith in humanity is put to an all time end. a new evil has arose, by the name of "wired."

of course, and incredibly late to the party, a "tech" outlet wrote about bitcoin. the headline was "is bitcoin killing the planet?" IT HAS BEEN POSSIBLY THE STUPIDEST ARTICLE IVE READ OF ALL TIME. THEY CLEARLY HAVE NO IDEA ABOUT ANY SHIT THEYRE TALKING ABOUT.

let's take a look at the TWO facts they got wrong, and displayed to over a MILLION people.

now, instead of just GOOGLING TWO SIMPLE FACTS, THEY DECIDED TO JUST WRITE RANDOM SHIT.

ENOUGH WAITING - HERE THE THE TWO FACTS THEY GOT WRONG

picture 1: bitcoin up $900 in the last year? THE LAST MOTHER FUCKING, COCK SUCKING

.
.
.

YEAR?!?

WHY DO SUCH DUMBASSES HAVE ACCESS TO SOMETHING MILLIONS VIEW?

IT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE

picture two: the actual fuck????

did i just read that?

b- bi- bitcoin will "run dry" BY 2032.

i think i finally figured it out.

these facts, they're literally just random number.

<thoughtBubble>
i can see it now:

wired employee 1: hey, guess what number im thinking of?

wired employee 2: 14?

wired employee 1: *screaming* BITCOIN WILL RUN DRY IN 14 YEARS

</thoughtBubble>

how do these people get hired. do they hire only hire 12 year old interns? im genuinely asking. does anyone know?

okay, end of rant. plz continue complaining about dumbasses who have power thru the media in tech

Tl;Dr Im the one of the few in my area that sees sftping as the prod service account shouldn't be a deployment process. And the ONLY ONE THAT CARES THAT THIS IS GONNA BREAK A BUNCH OF SHIT AT SOME POINT.

The non tl;dr:

For a whole year I've been trying to convince my area that sshing as the production service account is not the proper way to deploy and/or develop batch code. My area (my team and 3 sister teams) have no concept of using version control for our various Unix components (shell scripts and configuration files) that our CRITICAL for our teams ongoing success. Most develop in a "prodqa like" system and the remainder straight in production. Those that develop straight in prodqa have no "test" deployment so when they ssh files straight to actual production. Our area has no concept of continuous integration and automated build checking. There is no "test cases", no "systems testing" or "regression testing". No gate checks for changing production are enforced. There is a standing "approved" deployment process by the enterprise (my company is Whyyyyyyyyyy bigger than my area ) but no one uses it. In fact idk anyone in my area who knows HOW to deploy using the official deployment method. Yes, there is privileged access management on the service account. Yes the managers gets notified everytime someone accesses the privileged production account. The managers don't see fixing this as a priority. In fact I think I've only talk to ONE other person in my area who truly understands how terrible it is that we have full production change access on a daily basis. Ive brought this up so many times and so many times nothing has been done and I've tried to get it changed yet nothing has happened and I'm just SO FUCKING SICK that no one sees how big of a deal this. I mean, overall I live the area I work in, I love the people, yet this one glaring deficiency causes me so much fucking stress cause it's so fucking simple to fix.
We even have an newer enterprise deployment. Method leveraging a product called "urban code deploy" (ucd) to deploy a git repository. JUST FUCKING GIT WITH THE PROGRAM!!!!..... IT WAS RELEASED FUCKING 12 YEARS AGO......

Please..... Please..... I just want my otherwise normally awesome team to understand the importance and benefits of version control and approved/revertable deployments

Node: The most passive aggressive language I've had the displeasure of programming in.

Reference an undefined variable in a module? Prepare to waste your time hunting for it, because the runtime won't tell you about it until you reference a property or method on the quietly undefined module object.

Think you know how promises work? As a hiring manager, I've found that less than 5% of otherwise well-experienced devs are out of the Dunning Kruger danger zone.

Async causes edge cases and extra dev effort that add to the effort required to make a quality product.

Got a bug in one of your modules? Prepare yourself for some downtime because a single misplaced parentheses can take out the entire Node process, killing unrelated pages and even static file hosting.

All this makes for a programming experience that demands much higher cognitive load, creates more categories of bugs, and leads to code bloat/smell much more quickly than other commonly substituted languages.

From a business perspective, the money you save on scaling (assuming your app is more compute efficient under Node) is wasted on salaries and opportunity costs stemming from longer dev time, more QA, and more frequent outages.

IMO, Node is an awesome experiment, a fun language, a great tool for specific use cases, and a terrible fucking choice for an entire website.

I just need to vent about how frustrating and terrible Windows is.

It almost seems like consistentsy and attention to detail are completely foreign concepts to Microsoft. Everything from simple text selection (WHY DOES A DOUBLE CLICK INCLUDE THE TRAILING SPACE) to using advanced software feels like a chore.

Any sympathizers here? What problems do you need to vent about when trying to navigate your OS?

FWI I'm not a Mac or Linux user, so I have the joy of using Windows at home. I wish I could switch, but I prefer full access to my Steam library so I'm stuck with this option.

I know this sounds odd, but I really find algorithms things of delightful beauty.

A creative solution to some very deceptively complex problems.

Sure, some implementations aren't the best, but seeing them after just makes me appreciate the time and effort that must have gone into designing things like Merge Sort, Binary Search, Greedy Algorithms, BST, and Dijkstra's Algorithm.

So! If your code is unoptimal, looks terrible, or is a sheer abomination, take a moment to appreciate the little piece of art you've made before you go and make it better.

I can’t control my thoughts.

When someone says “wrap your head around” something, I imagine it. It happens every time.

It’s always 50/50. The one times the head of the person inside my head turns into a play-doh kind of sausage that wraps around a random object, usually a cube, and his face looks confused. It’s hard to separate his head from his neck and it terrifies me.

The other times the head appears extremely solid and has an overall round shape, then I subconsciously try to forcefully wrap it around that object but it doesn’t work and that person screams. It terrifies me even more.

Thoughts like this haunt me through my life. I hate it but I also somehow feel like I’ll miss it if they’re gone and at the same time I can’t decide whether it’s like a Stockholm syndrome towards that terrifying thoughts that are somehow both so personal yet so alien, or just my intuition lies to me again. Both of those possible reasons scare me even more.

My intuition is very valuable to me, I value it the same as I value the freedom of thought – above everything else. Those situations compromise both. Intuition is a major decision-making instrument to me, so terrible things will happen if I couldn’t trust it.

I don’t know what exactly I did wrong to become like this and I can’t remember when it all started

We use a open-source business management software (incl. crm, e-commerce, billing, accounting, warehouse, ...) that is highly customizable.

Previously we had "Company A" that customized it for my company. It was very expensive so they hired something to do the same but cheaper & inhouse. The codebase that "Company A" has written was terrible (confirmed by CTO & the new colleague").

Then the CFO wanted functionality A. Colleague said that this will take 2 weeks to implement. One week later, it was no longer needed & functionality B was now mandatory. Rinse & Repeat.

The CFO: "Why is nothing ever gonna get finished" or "why is the quality so bad?"

So they hired another person for the same position. This person has more experience so it costs them a lot more... And suddenly, everything works well

They contacted a few months later a consultant that analyzed the company. The consultant asked (for good reason) why such a small company has 2 people maintaining the in-house BM software. And suddenly, they wanted to get rid of the worst person. <enter my previous rant>

He is thrown out. Now the head of Operations wants to remove that software because it was not "sexy" enough (her words). So they introduced a glorified spreadsheet with less functionality. That new colleague was offered to take the lead on that project... And thus he fled to another company.

That project failed and now everyone is fired... And they hired back "Company A" to maintain that BM project.

I messed up . My testicle problem isn't going anywhere soon, and one ultrasound report already says could be a tumor. 2nd test will be done in 10 days, but if its a cancer, then my life just got officially reduced by 20 years and practically reduced to this year, coz fuck this life if I can't be normal.

I already
- haven't ever got love or chance to kiss a loved one,
-have a super beta personality and never got enough respect from anyone
- am not having any friends at current stage
- shifted from my native location and living in a new isolated place
- got ugly ass looks, height and weight to never feel happy

and now with a probable tumor coming which would lead to hair lossing chemo sesssions, ball removal surgery and followed by lifelong of infertility, I would prefer death over a meaningless loveless life

I am so devastated as to why i got into this state. nothing has been going good for lalst 2 years.
- i left my previous company which had a great culture, less work but asked for relocation . i joined this current company with horrible work culture, 3 days working and overload of stress
- I had fights with my friends and don't have any friends anymore
- i broke my arm this year.
- i caught terrible cough last year which took time but got better
- there have been constant bickering and fights among parents for 100s of reason . no more than 2 days goes by when any 2/3 people of our nucleolus family is not fighting
- and countless more shitty stuff

I was on a path to become a mediocre okayish guy. i was having a decent salary , learning new stuff everyday, fighting new task battles, becoming a beeter dev amd aiming to go for senior dev/TL role, buying car l, new home and planning for marriage, ...

but nope. God has some other plans.. some ugly and cruel plans, for the guys who don't even had the chance to live a villionous life.

I wonder how that guy from my scchool who used to date so many girls is doing now. God must be very angry with his Casanova behaviour. Oh wait, that asshole is earning 160k and married her gf from last 8 years!

i wonder how that gu from my homies is doing who used to hookup with random girls every weekend. Oh wait, he got promoted to TL and bought a new home!

I wonder how my friend who smokes 4 cigs a day and drinks beer every night is doing. Oh, he's going on international trips every month , earning 600k and have a clean medical record!

yepp such a great decision maker that guy on the top is . Let me connect with him soon and ask these questions , will let you know what he says. :/