Not only in my work, but in my life.

My biggest inspiration is the popcorn seller that patiently stays outside the subway exit, standing, every fucking day, from 4-5pm until 0-2am.

He stays until after the subway closes, and only leaves after everyone waiting for their Uber or their ride do.

In the rainiest day of the year, he was there.
In the coldest day of the year, he was there.
In the worst crisis of our country in the last decades, the region became temporarily infested by bandits and beggars. Sometimes I had to work overtime until 11:30pm and I had to be very cautious with all the robbers in the empty dark street. But guess who was there, sometimes calmly saying "get out, go work" to the bad elements bothering him?

I find it reallybfunny and refreshing when everyone is inside waiting for the rain to settle down, while he is standing in the middle of it. Or when I'm coming home really late, and he is still out there freezing cold.
There is no excuse for not doing your best. Life sucks sometimes, but there are no excuses. Just work hard, and laugh at the bad times.
Every time I saw him there, I thought "my day was hard, but I could've worked even harder". At the same time he made me feel better for having a better job, he inspired me not to bitch about any little things.

Then you might ask: "isn't he dumb to stay until 2am even though he is probably not getting any costumers after 11pm?" or "how can someone so unsuccessful be so inspiring?"

Well, I don't know. He just is.
Do almighty, genious people like Steve Jobs inspire me at work? Of course. More than this man? Certainly not.

The bug: Some string values for an identifier property in the data objects are being sent from our frontend prefixed with a '0'. Sometimes. When it happens, it usually gets stripped away again by the time it's passed to our backend. But not always.

This 0 is never explicitly set anywhere. I even searched for a few variants of " = 0" in both the frontend and backend projects without receiving any results. You might already be suspecting where this is going.

So it turns out.

The data object which holds this value is being initialized in the aspnet (don't ask) backend and passed to the frontend, which then hydrates it. This value is always an integer number, albeit incidentally so which is why string is used as the actual type. When this object is initialized, it's hardcoded with an anonymous type where this property is set as int because I guess someone figured "it's always an int though". Being a typed language, primitive scalars can't be null objects which means the property's value becomes the concrete int 0.

Okay weird. I can think of better ways of doing this but let's just set it to string as I can't start overhauling things right now. Let's just go find where this value is somehow concatenated into the incoming parameter.

You see, this happens because at the point where the frontend sets this value, it may be an int or string depending on where it came from, and I guess someone figured that in order to cast it to string you just go prop += arg seeing as the prop is empty string and all. Because explicitly casting it or - as much as I get a rash whenever I see it - going prop = "" + arg would be too verbose and unoriginal.

Bonus round: How come the 0 only sometimes made it all the way to our backend? The thing is that this bug has been fixed before. The fix is that because this string is "always" an int, you can parse it to int before passing it to the backend in case it has leading zeroes. This path is only taken in certain views because someone forgot to copypaste their fix into all the places this is repeated.

Sometimes you find a bug and you are just somehow more grumpy after fixing it.

Not dev related so don't shoot me. If you like writing I figure you maybe might enjoy this and thought I'd share.

This is a section from an unfinished novel about 2050s America, set in a corporate subsidized mega-fevela sprawling across washington state, ruled by gangs and patrolled by the officers of a bankrupt nation suffering through austerity and on-and-off again spasms of mass civil conflict.

"Averice - Sex, drugs, and vice, in the downfall and dying days of america."

we lived in a smoke government, where everything was bullshit they blew up your ass so you could continue make believe while
you were bent over with your head in the hole in the ground you mistook for your ass to start with. And if you questioned it all, one bit, the mouth organ of the state would command
hate upon you, like an old latin curse, with a lexicon armada of phrases like "terrorist", and "troubled individual" to character assassinate you by drowning you in the humbling river of societies mass delusion giver, those two sweet letters "TV."

No, we were on the industry edge here, inventing better bait to catch what the state politiburo labelled 'bandits', all for what?

It had, in later years become fashionable to call those who didn't want to be stolen from any more, projected as it were, "thieves", in the same fashion as those in the middle east, defending
their homeland from foreigners, were labelled "insurgents." Tyranny had not so long ago grown a sense of irony it would seem.

And if you became enemy number one of the state, as thousands were, you would spend your days on the run, always looking over your
shoulder for the states vanish vans--black escalades with men in dark suits and mirrored glasses, like bugmen with shiny inhuman, and inscrutable eyes full of alien malice.

These were sordid summers, full of plastic playhouses where the cost of a days wages you could lay with a synthetic lover and pay away the days tense tax for a good lay, and forget your toils and troubles. And so many were kept in poverty because of easy habit and routine that they forget they were not living.

But for me, I had none of it. I preferred the troubled thing on the corner when I could coax one into my state issued sedan. She was sulky, with bright blonde curls, 19, maybe 20, with empty eyes, as if watching some invisible horizon. And in the glow of the blue neon, among the wet sidewalks, and trash, she leaned into my car. No words were exchanged. I nodded, and
she got into the car, a miniskirt, and slinky little handbag.

This was no more than state business with a bureau guy like me, and for her, little more than the prison trade taken public.

She huffed some powder and climbed spraddle leg onto my lap, grabbing me along my jawline, eyes locked onto the depths of my soul, and
for the next ten minutes as she moved on top of me, I was motionless property while my lusts became animal, and she, my cream cup.

After, I arrested her to the standard protests, but she new the game and quickly hushed. This was the verdant arithmetic of the state. I was awarded x amount of pension points for every criminal, no matter how, and it was no gentle hand, not the judge, not the jury, or the executioner of their will. It was the rigid touch of a long arm, dislocated from the law, and now, like frankenstein's monster, cobbled onto the mechanism of the state not unlike the manner of a combine harvester.

We were the owners of all by virtue of all we could take, and we took all we could get. The serial romeos of state police power, romancing
the unwilling citizenry with televised patriotism and five minute power talks at the beginning of the corporate day.

It could be paradise or a wasteland if we wanted it to be. And for a time it was.

Edit: devrant always breaks my formatting. sigh.