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 started my first job with no degree and no real experience. It was a sink or swim kind of place. Six months in, I was working on a bunch of projects independently, then they hired a new junior developer, and told me it was my job to mentor him.

a lot of the time I knew what to do to get the job done, but I didn't know why. He always asked why... Learning something is one thing, teaching it is another. This guy was the best co-worker I've ever had because he pushed me to be much better while we learned together.

At my first job, I got tired of having to type a user name and password every time I debugged the web application. Thinking I was clever, I put in a hack so that if you launched the application with the query string "?user=Administrator" it would log you in as the administrator. So much typing saved!

A couple days after the next release, I realized it shipped like that. In absolute horror, I walked into my boss' office, closed the door, and told him the tale of my mistake.

He just looked back at me, and after a moment or two said, "Loose lips sink ships."

And that was it.

Client: Hey. So. LOVE your work. Got my computer repaired at your place a few weeks ago. And you guys did a GREAT job. But noooooow...my phone is acting up. Can you fix it?

Me: Why yes! We can! It will be ________! Keep in mind, the price includes all labor and comes with a three month warranty!

Client: But you said the last time I was there I had a warranty. Why isn't my phone covered under warranty?

Me: because the warranty only covers your computer issue that we fixed.

Client: BUT YOU SAID I HAD A WARRANTY!!!!!

It was at that moment I wanted nothing more than to sink into the wall behind me and wash my hands of this insanity.

Suddenly it hits me.
It’s 01:20 here but i get it.
It’s ALL a budget thing.

No dedicated tester means less expenses.

No personal parkspot?
No expenses!

And no good staging or testing environment? Less expenses!

Meanwhile every developer can setup, work on, and maintain about 20 websites on their shitty local Windows machine, that doesn’t even have a proper SSD installed, and we are setting impossible deadlines to figure out who will sink and who will swim.

Ow, here is a SSD.. Figure out the installation yourself because we have no IT knowledge or budget for people that do.

You want a challenge? How about 40 other people that are distracting you all day long.

Meanwhile everybody has to improve their skills in js, react, html5, ccs3, angular, .net and razor so money can made faster.

It would be nice if you could build apps as well.

You had a question? Sorry, no time. Expect some feedback 14 days later.

You finished the site?
Great!

But here are 101 bugs to solve before next week.

All hail their crazy company!

Once upon a time, there were a restaurant called "iEat.tech.com".
It was a small single-location place, where the sufficient number of patrons could be served by the cozy number of employees.
In fact, headcount was so lean that the cook was also the one who washed all the dishes.

But then came the suits and their "VC"(daddy) money and scaled shit up.
Soon, there were so many patrons that the dishes started to pile up the sink, never washed.
"We need someone to wash the dishes!" said the cook
"Fuck you, you wash the dishes!" said the s*its
Naturally, the cook left soon after.

The s*its had a problem now. They could not replace the cook fast enough - all other cooks were either young, inexperienced and mediocre (but did clean the dishes), or refused to waste their time on the sink.
So the suits did what $*its always do - they got a fucking consultant. Who told them to get a fucking dishwashing machine and billed them the GDP of Ireland.

The s*is, of course, did not want to buy a dishwashing machine. "Our fucking process is too fucking disruptive for us to use a fucking store-bought mass-produced metal servant!" (s*its don't know what "machines" are. For them, it's all in terms of "servants", employees and machines alike).

So the s*its hired an engineer to "solve the fucking dish problem, once and for all".
The engineer quickly started measuring and drawing and calculating. The engineer was about to prepare a budget when the s*its came screaming "What the fuck are you doing? There is a fucking pile of dishes in the sink!"
The engineer replied that "I'm designing the machine!", to what the s*its responded "don't bring me fucking problems, bring me solutions!" (or some other s*it blabber)

So the engineer quickly designed an efficient dishwashing assembly line to be done in half the time most people would. And then went back to designing the machine.
But the s*its were having none of it. They kept expanding and expanding and doing what they could so that the engineer never had a moment to work on the machine. They dit it so surreptitiously that no one barely even noticed, but one day they were paying a team of engineers to be fucking human dishwashers.

Now replace "dishes" with "Jira tickets" or "quick fixes" or "tiny changes" and fix other terms accordingly.
Fucking s*its.

Got rejected after final-round interviews with Amazon again. Can’t say it doesn’t hurt, but I understand it.

So to make myself feel better, I started working on the idea I’ve had for a while that I realize is going to be a huge time sink and silly, but I love it.

This is something I'll never forget.

I'm a senior UI engineer. I was working at a digital agency at the time and got tasked with refactoring and improving an existing interface from a well known delivery company.

I open the code and what do I find? Indentation. But not in the normal sense. The indentation only went forward, randomly returning a bunch of tabs back in the middle of the file a few times, but never returning to its initial level after closing a tag or function, both on HTML and JS.

Let that sink in for a minute and try to imagine what it does to your editor with word wrapping (1 letter columns), and without (absurd horizontal scrolling).

Using Sublime at the time, ctrl+shift+P, reindent. Everything magically falls beautifully into place. Refactor the application, clean up the code, document it, package it and send it back (zip files as they didn't want to provide version control access, yay).

The next day, we get a very angry call from the client saying that their team is completely lost. I prove to the project manager that my code is up to scratch, running fine, no errors, tested, good performance. He returns to the client and proves that it's all correct (good PM with decent tech knowledge).

The client responds with "Yeah, the code is running, but our team uses tabs for version control and now we lost all versioning!".

Bear in mind this was in 2012, git was around for 7 years then, and SVN and Mercury much longer.

I then finally understood the randomness of the tabs. The code would go a bunch of tabs back when it went back to a previous version, everything above were additions or modifications that joined seamlessly with the previous version before, with no way to know when and so on.

I immediately told the PM that was absurd, he agreed, and told the client we wouldn't be reindenting everything back for them according to the original file.

All in all, it wasn't a bad experience due to a competent PM, but it left a bad taste in my mouth to know companies have teams that are that incompetent, and that no one thought to stop and say "hey, this may cause issues down the line".

# PROD

* 10 app instances running
* 1 instance starts burning up 100% cpu
* we ask for a Thread Dump (stack traces)
* we get a TD taken after they manually restarted the instance
* they: "Please investigate. We need this fixed ASAP"
* .....

EVERY FUCKING TIME!!! Not once in recent years have they managed to take a TD correctly. What kind of a retarded monkey do you have to be for this to not sink in for YEARS!

Who tf put those idiot monkeys there in the first place...

Grr the feeling when one of your interviewers has a hard-on for trying to find ways to sink your boat.

Went to a job interview yesterday during my lunch break for a mid level dev job in central London , i have been trying to transition from a junior role.

First were two senior devs , that went quiet well...

Next up was the tech lead and a team lead, lets call the latter Mc-douche for some problem

The tech lead was fine, very relaxed and clam guy more interested in seeing the logic of my answers and questions as to why i did certain things in this or that manner....

Mc-douche, he would always try to find something wrong then smile smugly and do that sideways head waggle thing

His tech lead is like " yup that's correct"
But he would be like " yeeess but you didn't think about bla bla bla" then talk about shit not even present in the context of the question

Ah also he would ask a question then cut me off as soon as I begin to say that i didnt mention or take into account x or y even though literally my next sentence is about address those details he wanted.
let me fucking finish you dickbag 😡

Had a js question, simple stuff about dom manipulation, told not to bother with code... yet McD starts asking me to write the code for it....managed it , quite easy stuff

Then a sql and db test , again technlead was happy with the answers and the logic am approaching the question when writing my query, yet mc d Is bitching about SQL syntax....
Ok fine, i made a simple mistake, I forgot and used WHERE instead of HAVING in a group by but really?! Thats his focus ?!

Most devs I know look up syntax to do stuff , they focus on their logic first the do the impl.

Then a general question on some math and how i would code to impl a solution on paper
That was a 20 mins one, the question said they didn't expect me to finish it totally so
I approached it like an exam question.

First
I focussed on my general flow of my process, listing out each step.

Then elaborated each step with pseudo code showing my logic for each of the key steps.

Then went deeper and started on some of the classes and methods , was about to finish before it was time up.

Mc douch went through my solution
And grudgingly admitted my logic was "robust enough" it was like he really had to yank that deep out of his colon.

I didn't really respond to any of his rudeness throughout the whole interview,i either smiled politely or put on a keen looking poker face.

Really felt awful the rest of the day, skipped the gym and went home after work, really sucks to have a hostile interviewer.

Pretty sure i wont be hearing anything good from them even though the three other interviewers were happy with me I felt.

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

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

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.

After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.

While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.

I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.

I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.

I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.

There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.

Today I learned why it’s so important to have life outside engineering (better put, I remembered this).

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been working hard to catch some deadlines, contributing to a large oss project. Getting up at 4am, working with the team in my timezone, having some time with family then working with people with 6-9 hour difference was extremelly challenging and I was so tired I literaly was a fucking pain to bear with.

Today, on Saturday, my wife started cleaning the bathroom sink drain. You know, started... “won’t fix” was not an option. First, the dirt and the smell, mmmmmm, you just have to love it. And then the thing collapses (yes, I was optimistic, trying to clean it just partly - I learned not to fix if it aint’t broken, I wonder where).

It’s of course built of trivial parts, but the water just finds its way. Needless to say, I am afraid of it :). In the end, it got resolved. Just as any bug we squash - with some anger and plenty of dirty words.

During the whole thing, I thought to myself, that all that stress at work is quite bearable; it put everything back into a perspective. Great feeling!

Oh no! What have I done? I opened up devRant at 8:00am and it's now 9:55am. This is literally my biggest time sink and I love it.

I haven't been productive since the bs. (Refer to previous rant) And one deadline is approaching very fast.

My Christmas was ruined because I was anxious/annoyed/everything negative about the bs as well as being alone and stuck in a village. My new year has always been crap but this year it was extra crap.

Overall, I'm having none of the fun. My life is starting to feel like a deadend. I feel like I have to give up on my dreams to survive. And that no one is really on my side, despite whatever they say.

The ADHD rejection sensitivity is also heavily activated. Like I know that realistically I can fix this, but at this point I just want to break everything and let the ship sink.

I have lost time that I could be productive to this bs. And I wish nothing but misery for all those responsible for putting me in this situation. (I take responsibility for my mistakes, but not for how others behaved towards me)

I get so fucking awkward and autistic when i sit at work 8h a day and just work... I cant fucking communicate with people. I behave like the most extreme "nice guy" beta shithead and its hard to fight it.

Went to put coffee in the sink now and a girl was washing the dishes. In the same time another girl was coming into the kitchen. I stopped and wanted to wait for her to wash them. The girl walking in looked at me weird. I was turning around pretening like im searching something. She asked hey do u need something. I then turned a 360 in place (oh my fucking God) walked towards the sink 1 step and then 1 step back as if i forgot to walk. Then i replied i just wanted to wash the coffee. And then i awkwardly put the coffee in sink for the girl to clean my coffee too

So fucking embarrassing!

Only when i work from home at my pace within my environment ALONE (im the biggest introvert) is when i dont become autistic. I can communicate. Im an alpha chad

I can't stop procrastinating from doing what I need to do. This extends to even web development and coding on personal projects, which is something I really enjoy doing.

It's as if I have some sort of underlying fear holding me back each time I get the chance to get things done. Normally I don't have the time and make the excuse for myself that there "is not enough time" but tbh I now literally have an entire week in front of me free, with nobody to distract me. I am actually getting my long-desired time alone. I can finally power through all the things that require intense focus, like coding.

And yet, I can't bring myself to just do it. Instead I make excuses and go play video games instead (Overwatch has been a really bad time sink for me). I haven't been able to do what I wanted to for like a year now. What the fuck is wrong with me?

I need help guys!! Anyone have advice for me?

Looks like it's time to update the old CV... Christ have I really been here for 8 years.

It's been fun, the most fun time of my life but with new owners breathing on everything stuffs starting to fall to shit.

To use a SysOps analogy there are category 1 - critical warnings ringing in my ears.

I can accept a lot, but I'm genuinely concerned for the future of this place, and after trying to fix things for long enough to realise the new owners are the ones drilling the holes in the ship it's time to sink or swim, and I don't feel like sinking.

To quote billy Joel,
It seems such a waste of time
If that's what it's all about
Mama if that's movin' up
Then I'm movin' out

Today.
I hate everyone.
I can't wait to stop working here, and I curse my inability to say 'no' out of pity.
I should have left them in the pit of smoking shit they dug for themselves, but NO i let them drag me in as always, even though I had all the rights to tell them to fuck off. But no, fucking 'good-hearted' me. I'm a hypocrite.
And so I managed to do something in the beginning, something in the middle, something a hour ago, then sent some messages around just to let everyone know I'm here, and the remaining 90% of the time I just let myself sink in my hatred for all of this.
Definitely not a productive day.

My boss gave me a lab pc (not controlled by the internal IT) so I can put whatever OS I want on there. I'm planning to also write certain documents with something like LaTeX on it.

When he gave it to me, he said “but don't goo too overboard with it, I know much time you can sink into Linux and TeX”

Me, actually planning to go fully overboard in every aspect: “haha yeah don't worry I'll just install Ubuntu or something”

Man wk89 awesome... bringing back a lot of memories. The one thing really stands out to me though is the software.

I see a lot of rants about people shocked that turboC is still in use or other DOS programs are still in production. A lot can of bad be said here but I think often it's a case of we truly don't build things like we did in the good old days.

What those devs accomplished with such limited resources is phenomenal and the fact that we still haven't managed to replicate the feel and usability of it says a lot, not to mention just how fucking stable most of it was.

My favourite games are all DOS based, my most favourite of all time Sherlock is 103kb in size. When I started coding games I made a clone of it and to this day I am still trying to figure out what sorcery is in the algorithm that generates/solves puzzles that makes it so fast and memory efficient. I must have tried 100+ ways and can't even come close. NB! If you know you can hint but don't tell me. Solving this is a matter of personal pride.

Where those games really stand out is when you get into the graphics processing - the solutions they came up with to render sprites, maps and trick your eyes into seeing detail with only 4-16 colours is nothing short of genius. Also take a second to consider that taking a screen shot of the game is larger than the entire game itself and let that sink in...

I think the dramatic increase in storage, processing power and ram over the last decade is making us shit developers - all of us. Just take one look at chrome, skype or anything else mainline really and it's easy to see we no longer give a rats ass about memory anywhere except our monthly AWS/GCE bill.

We don't have to be creative or even mindful about anything but the most significant memory leaks in order to get our software to run now days. We also don't have constraints to distribute it, fast deliver-ability is rewarded over quality software. It's only expected to stay in production 3-4 years anyway.

Those guys were the true "rockstars" and "ninja" developers and if you can't acknowledge that you can take ya React app and shovit.

Here's to @Wisecrack:

Some time ago I pitched an idea to my boss about a platform we implement to optimize some fucked-up processes and in fact a whole project and I boasted some 20-30% increase in productivity. Yeah, I know ... what a fucking big mouth.

Truth be told they (almost all project members) went all for it so we started working on that software.

A small step for me, a GIANT LEAP IN A FUCKING CESSPOOL.

And of course it's just the two of us - me and my colleague - as always.
And we don't have requirements - as always.
And now there are deadlines too!
And people be like: IS IT READY YET?

So between playing a consultant, a product owner, systems architect, product manager, designer, front-end/back-end developer, DBA, DevOps engineer, YOU-NAME-IT-ROLE, and dealing with my everyday work-related bullshit (because yes, I do that too) I lost all appetite for it.
I actually loved this idea and what it can be born out of it, now I'm frustrated. It's still relevant and it will still benefit them, but I am already FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF IT.

So my "oh, how I'd love to help them" personality is fighting my "let them sink in their own shit" personality and I'll see which will come on top. :)

Truth is if I had the "5-years-ago me" energy a good chunk of that project would be done by now. 😁

Also yesterday my daughter had shouted at old people and had thrown stuff at them while at kindergarten. I sure hope they deserved it LOL.

FML?

long time listener, first time caller. I love designers. seriously. I love getting a nice juicy Figma file and not knowing how the heck I'm going to do half the wild stuff in it, but it's beautiful, so I'll figure it out. Go ahead, send it to the client. But designers who learn how to use something like Elementor or one of those crappy kitchen-sink themes, call themselves developers, and win work with clients I share with them. I'm the one fixing everything when that crap breaks. I would never in a million years present myself as a designer, even though I know I know a damn sight more about design than they do about dev. I get it, everyone needs to make a buck, but every time this happens it makes me sick to my stomach. We're on the same team. I always, ALWAYS, go to the mat for good design. Why don't more designers have an equal amount of respect for us? Design phase always goes over deadlines and we always have to pick up the slack to make the hard launch date. Well, now I'm just rambling.

!rant

So I've been using Linux as my desktop and server environment for a solid month now, and I think the biggest benefit it's been for me is the digitial detoxification. I no longer worry about having the biggest/most high spec computer anymore and instead my OS is built around getting as much clutter and distractions out of the way so I can focus on programming as much as possible. It's very much akin to my mediatation sessions where you cut out everything around you to regain your focus.

It's the same feeling I got when I lost interest in video games. it was a huge time sink that was entertaining yes, but it no longer gives me the same feeling of accomplishment as getting over the mountain of a project goal and reaching the summit. Linux is a more challenging environment but with that challeng comes the excitement of learning something new, and your environment is in your own hands.

It's been a while but I should go back to my buddist meditation group again. I've been a workaholic for the past couple months and I need to afford myself time again to decompress.

ZNC shenanigans yesterday...

So, yesterday in the midst a massive heat wave I went ahead, booze in hand, to install myself an IRC bouncer called ZNC. All goes well, it gets its own little container, VPN connection, own user, yada yada yada.. a nice configuration system-wise.

But then comes ZNC. Installed it a few times actually, and failed a fair few times too. Apparently Chrome and Firefox block port 6697 for ZNC's web interface outright. Firefox allows you to override it manually, Chrome flat out refuses to do anything with it. Thank you for this amazing level of protection Google. I didn't notice a thing. Thank you so much for treating me like a goddamn user. You know Google, it felt a lot like those plastic nightmares in electronics, ultrasonic welding, gluing shit in (oh that reminds me of the Nexus 6P, but let's not go there).. Google, you are amazing. Best billion dollar company I've ever seen. Anyway.

So I installed ZNC, moved the client to bouncer connection to port 8080 eventually, and it somewhat worked. Though apparently ZNC in its infinite wisdom does both web interface and IRC itself on the same port. How they do it, no idea. But somehow they do.

And now comes the good part.. configuration of this complete and utter piece of shit, ZNC. So I added my Freenode username, password, yada yada yada.. turns out that ZNC in its infinite wisdom puts the password on the stdout. Reminded me a lot about my ISP sending me my password via postal mail. You know, it's one thing that your application knows the plaintext password, but it's something else entirely to openly share that you do. If anything it tells them that something is seriously wrong but fuck! You don't put passwords on the goddamn stdout!

But it doesn't end there. The default configuration it did for Freenode was a server password. Now, you can usually use 3 ways to authenticate, each with their advantages and disadvantages. These are server password, SASL and NickServ. SASL is widely regarded to be the best option and if it's supported by the IRC server, that's what everyone should use. Server password and NickServ are pretty much fallback.

So, plaintext password, default server password instead of SASL, what else.. oh, yeah. ZNC would be a server, right. Something that runs pretty much forever, 24/7. So you'd probably expect there to be a systemd unit for it... Except, nope, there isn't. The ZNC project recommends that you launch it from the crontab. Let that sink in for a moment.. the fucking crontab. For initializing services. My whole life as a sysadmin was a lie. Cron is now an init system.

Fortunately that's about all I recall to be wrong with this thing. But there's a few things that I really want to tell any greenhorn developers out there... Always look at best practices. Never take shortcuts. The right way is going to be the best way 99% of the time. That way you don't have to go back and fix it. Do your app modularly so that a fix can be done quickly and easily. Store passwords securely and if you can't, let the user know and offer alternatives. Don't put it on the stdout. Always assume that your users will go with default options when in doubt. I love tweaking but defaults should always be sane ones.

One more thing that's mostly a jab. The ZNC software is hosted on a .in domain, which would.. quite honestly.. explain a lot. Is India becoming the next Chinese manufacturers for software? Except that in India the internet access is not restricted despite their civilization perhaps not being fully ready for it yet. India, develop and develop properly. It will take a while but you'll get there. But please don't put atrocities like this into the world. Lastly, I know it's hard and I've been there with my own distribution project too. Accept feedback. It's rough, but it is valuable. Listen to the people that criticize your project.

As a developer, I WAS love with the concept of WFH. Thankfully, my office has no fixed hours (except for meetings!) and I can work at my pace peacefully. But lately, with WFH becoming mandatory, I can't seem to find time for myself!

Here's what my schedule looks like:
a. Start working at 10am
b. Standup at 11:30am
c. Lunch break at 2am
d. End work at 7pm.

A fairly simple routine but not sure why my team finds it completely normal to call me in off hours and moreover expect me to jump in a call too! I wish it was a 1-day affair. But no. It's a 24x7 day affair. Yes, let that sink in. 24x7.

How I wish there was no COVID and thus no lockdown. At least, people respected the work timings then !

Ffs, HOW!?!? Fuck! I need to get this rotten bs out.

RDS at its max capabilities from the top shelf, works OK until you scale it down and back up again. Code is the same, data is the same, load is the same, even the kitchen sink is the same, ffs, EVERYTHING is the same! Except the aws-managed db is torn down and created anew. From the SAME snapshots! But the db decides to stop performing - io tpt is shit, concurrency goes through the roof.

Re-scale it a few more times and the performance gets back to normal.

And aws folks are no better. Girish comes - says we have to optimize our queries. Rajesh comes - we are hitting the iops limit. Ankur comes - you're out of cpu. Vinod thinks it's gotta be the application to blame.

Come on guys, you are a complete waste of time for a premium fucking support!

Not to mention that 2 enhanced monitoring graphs show anythung but the read throughput.

Ffs, Amazon, even my 12yo netbook is more predictable than your enterprise paas! And that support..... BS!

We're now down to troubleshooting aws perf issues rather than our client's....

The worst co worker I had is actually pretty recent. He joined a well integrated team on what was basically a legacy project. He sounded like a good developer and seemed to know his stuff but it took him ages to push out fixes/features. They were always massively over-engineered, poorly named, partially tested and what documentation he did write still managed to bitch about how poor the project was structured.

He spent most of his time bitching about the general shitty nature of the project (he wasn't wrong) and the lack of interest from other Devs.

He was so unpleasant in interpersonal communication that by the end no one would work with him.

In his last team meeting he basically said he was glad to be going and that we were all lazy, disinterested and shouldn't consider ourselves his peers. The equivalent of storming out of a party after setting the couch on fire and shitting in the sink.

We've since removed all his overcomplicated, not standard, unmaintainable code.

Have you ever gotten a task where you have to modify some existing code, and to get it to work the way it needs to you have to write some ugly ass code?

And I'm talking FUGLY ass code. The kind where every brain cell you have screams to refactor it all so that your code won't be so ugly and you can live with yourself. But you only wrote it that way because some numbnuts who was fired a year ago designed it that way, and left zero commentary or documentation on his reasoning ("sELf-dOcUmeNtiNg cOde, bRuH!").

It doesn't pose any sort of risk with regards to security or resource management or efficiency, or really even faulty logic. It just looks fucking awful, my brain can instantly see better ways to design it and I don't want history to tie my name to it.

But also the system is being gutted and retired within a matter of months, so maintenance won't even be a concern; and you know that you have a lot of other large tasks that need your attention too, and to refactor will ultimately prove to be a time sink.

I mean ultimately, I know what I need to do, but I guess it's a pride thing. Just makes me feel icky.

Some humans are calm and thoughtful, some annoyingly complicated, while others with behaviours too difficult to comprehend.
I got a call from the office (former from 6 months ago) and it's from the G.M herself.

** Phone rings **
Hmm see who's calling...

Me: * Picks up phone and set it on loud speaker, so my partner can also listen *

Me: Hello Ma

G.M: Hey (calls me by my full name)

Me: It's really nice to he...

G.M: Why would you move the YETI server hosted on AWS to Azure! We have been faced with lots of challenges ever since and that has cost the company a lot.

Me: Pardon me Ma, but that...

G.M: That is a very bad and unacceptable behaviour from you and I can have the company sue you for this.

Me: Excuse me Ma, but...

G.M: I have spoken with the director of C.M.D quaters (A sister company) and explained the situation on ground about what you did before leaving without having any prior permission. What nonsense!

** At this point my partner let's call her "CC"... was more confused than me**

CC : **Panicking** Who's that? What did you do? I thought you said you no longer work at that firm, what's going on?

Now I'm confused cus I don't even know who to reply.

Me: **Signals CC to calm the fuck down**

G.M: ** Still talking and spitting out millions of threats to the guy who left the company with evil deeds in mind...**

CC who literally hates suspense and also a half cool and half crackhead kind of person... Tries stealing the phone from me so she could pour out whatever is on her mind to the caller because of how disgusted she felt, mostly for reasons I quite understood but nevertheless i kept the phone far from her reach while we both enjoyed the suiting voice of *a threat giver*

Honestly at this point my closest guess was "Joe, who must have fucked up big time" because Joe is the company's SysAdmin and has a lot of fucked up records (One time Joe tried to convert all system OSes to Linux even with our hydra servers with pre-installed windows running smoothly, his action caused a noticeable server down-time all for the reason of Joe being a Linux freak). He and only he has the power to transfer/switch/off/on servers at will. I really don't know what Joe must have done but sure thing is there is a fuck up somewhere.
Talking about me, I was only a developer enthroned only within his desk and secondly I no longer worked there. Who fucking calls a retired soldier about a lost battle after six freaking months later! Just fucking sink with your ship captain!

But how can I explain all of this to G.M without implicating Joe and also not look like snitch, I thought to myself.

While I was pondering within myself and the call which has long been disconnected, CC broke the silence.

CC: Giddy, Can you honestly explain me why your old company is calling talking about lawyers and suing you? Have you been lying to me about your work?

Me: *Explained the situation to CC*

CC: But why was she that saucy and acting a bitch? You should have spare me a minute with her.

Me: She wouldn't let me speak but we good CC. We good.
The woman that just called is the G.M. of the firm I had formerly worked with and she's also the wife to the M.D of the same firm which was my former direct Boss whom I respect a lot. Having a disjunct with the wife can also affect the relationship with the husband, which I don't want to lose. So we cool!

Maybe I should text her or maybe not... But before then
** Another call comes in **
It's her again.

GM: Hello Giddy (Sounding calm)

Me: (WTF. She called me by my first name and also sounds cool... More confused than a stray dog) ...Yeah Hello

GM: I just called to let you know that my accusation was wrong because I was misinformed. Joe Nosa was in charge on Systems but why didn't you correct me on that during our last conversation?

Me: ... 😲

CC: (Drags the phone) Hello and Good morning whosoever...

G.M: Sorry who am I speaking with?

CC: (Introduced herself) I overheard your last conversation with Giddy, and I demand you appogise to him both in written and in verbal because not only did you accused him falsely, you also almost bridge the trust between us which may have cost the relationship.

Me: ...
** Long awkward silence **

G.M: Hey Giddy, I'm sorry. Just angry about what went down recently.

Me: All good ma'am

CC: ** Hangs up **

Let me start this off by stating I'm a Java dev, and a noob with C++.

Thought it'd be cool to learn some OpenCL, since I want to do some maths stuff and why not learn something new.

So I sat down, installed Nvidia proprietary drivers, broke my x-org server, purged, reinstalled, rebooted and after a while I got stuff sorted out.

Then on to my IDE. I use CLion and it uses Cmake. C++ noob knows shit about Cmake, so struggle for two hours trying to figure out wtf is going on with the OpenCL libs and why they're only partially detected. Fml.

Finally, everything is configured and I'm set. I start working on a Hello World program using OpenCL. Finish it in 20 mins, all good. No output. Do some googling, check my program a million times. Nothing wrong here. Check the kernel, everything as in the tutorial.

I start checking error codes after a while reported by OpenCL (which I had no clue was a thing) and I get some code saying the program was not created properly (to run the kernel). No fucking clue what's up with that. Google around, find another tutorial, rewrite my code in case I'm using outdated code or something. Nothing.

Fast forward an hour, I find out that OpenCL has logs! So I grab some code from the website I found it on, and voila, I finally get some info on what's going on.

Get a load of this bs.

In the kernel file, so that OpenCL knows that it's a function to run, you have to put __kernel. But in all the places I read, it said to put it as _kernel.

Add the underscore, compile, run and everything is perfect.

Then I tried just putting 'kernel'. Also compiles and runs fine.

Two hours hours and my program was fixed by adding an underscore. IF ONLY C++ GAVE AN INDICATION OF WHAT BLEW UP INSTEAD OF SITTING BACK AND BEING LIKE "oh wow man feels bad, work some magic and try again" THEN THIS WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN SO LONG.

Then again, it was OpenCL that was being shitty with its styling enforcement or whatever the hell the underscore business is. But screw it. C++ eats shit too for this. Sure, maybe Java babies you by giving you the exact error and position that the error took place at. But at least that way you don't waste hours of your life chasing invisible bugs 😠😠

I'm going to eat some food... Too much energy was consumed fighting the system... Then I'll get back to OpenCL because 😇 but that doesn't make it less bs.

In last episode of "How SystemD screwed me over", we talked about Systemd's PrivateTMP and how it stopped me from generating SSL certificates.

In today's episode - SystemD vs CGroups!

Mister Pottering and his team apparently felt that CGroups are underused (As they can be quite difficult to set up), and so decided to integrate them into SystemD by default. As well as to provide a friendlier interface to control their values.

One can read about these interactions in the manual page "systemd.resource-control"

All is cool so far. So what happened to me today?

Imagine you did a major system release upgrade of a production server, previously tested on a standalone server. This upgrade doesn't only upgrade the distribution however, it also includes the switch from SysVInit to SystemD. Still, everything went smooth before, nothing to worry now then, right? Wrong.

The test server was never properly stress-tested. This would prove to be an issue.

When the upgrade finishes, it is 4 AM. I am happy to go to bed at last. At 6 AM, however, I am woken up again as the server's webservices are unavailable, and the machine is under 100% CPU load. Weird, I check htop and see that Apache now eats up all 32 virtual cores. So I restart it, casting it off to some weird bug or something as the load returns to normal.

2 hours later, however, the same situation occurs. This time, I scour all the logs I can, and find something weird - Many mentions that Apache couldn't create a worker thread? That's weird.

Several hours of research and tinkering later, I found out the following:
1 - By default, all processes of a system that runs SystemD are part of several CGroups. One of these CGroups is the PID CGroup, meant to stop a runaway process from exhausting all PIDs/TIDs of a system.

This limit is, by default, set to a certain amount of the total available PIDs. If a process exhausts this limit, it can no longer perform operations like fork().

So now, I know the how and why, but how should I solve this? The sanest option would be to get a rough estimate of just how many threads the Apache webserver might need. This option, though, is harder, than apparent. I cannot just take the MaxRequestsWorkers number... The instance has roughly double the amount of threads already. The cause being, as I found out, the HTTP/2 module, which spawns additional threads that do not count towards this limit. So I have no idea what limit to set.

Or I could... Disable the limit for just the webserver via the TasksAccounting switch. I thought this would work. And it did seem to... Until I ran out of TIDs again - Although systemctl status apache2.service no longer reported the number of tasks or a task limit of the process, the PID CGroup stayed set to the previous limit. Later I found out that I can only really disable the Task Accounting for all the units of a given slice and its parents.

This, though, systemctl somewhat didn't make apparent (And I skimmed the manual, that part was my fault)

So... The only remaining option I had was to... Just set the limit to infinite. And that worked, at last.

It took me several hours to debug this issue. And I once again feel like uninstalling systemd again, in favor of sysvinit.

What did I learn? RTFM, carefully, everything is important, it is not enough to read *half* the paragraph of a given configuration option...

Oh, and apache + http/2 = huge TID sink.

RANT! Clown VISA developer (you know, the one with ”extensive experience”) has still not finished his task which he was assigned after failing the last one which was easier. I wrote that they would fail and they have not even deployed anything to any environment. Not even dev. They just fuck around on their machines and this VISA guy says some nonsense shit on daily standups using mother fucking big words like it is really some difficult task they are doing. NOTHING has been done. It’s such a moral sink for the team.

When I asked nicely and asked if they have automated test they responded with a yes. So, I just dive into the repo and… no. There is no tests at all.

It is almost like they _think_ that tests automatically ate induced by osmosis or quantum mechanics or something. There is no tests. None. Zero. Why the ”yes”? 🤔

I looked at the commits and I can see no actual brain activity.

It will take a miracle. A miracle I say, to get any productive work out of this guy. What should he do? I mean, what should he actually get paid for? I do not understand. And he walks around in these $400 dollar jackets and coats and shit like he knows stuff.

I am having a really hard time accepting that he actually get paid at all.

So I just installed Android 11 on my OnePlus 6T with the 18.0 release of LineageOS. Screen recorder built-in that can finally record system sound and play it too (there used to be a Magisk module but that couldn't play system sound while recording it, everything else is just through the mic) and some doodads like the selection for where to blast your music into has been moved more into view... Epic.

And then comes the Scoped Storage. Oh boy were the Android devs right to hate the guts out of it. It's so fucking slow. Seriously, on that exact device with Android 10, blazing fast. That storage is far from cooked. On Android 11.. have a directory with a thousand or so files, and it takes 5 goddamn seconds to open the directory with them in it. And even with external file managers that you give storage access like usual! Except when you root your device and use a root file manager, then it's fast again. Because that's using the shell instead.

I never thought I'd be able to say this to be honest. The shell is faster than the native tools. Let that sink in for a moment. The shell is faster than the native tools. How on Earth did Google think that this is tolerable?! For security, are you kidding me? Yeah I'll just use the root account for fucking everything in all that security, to have a functioning system!

Android 10 was also initially planned to have this terrible storage system, but due to developer backlash, Google waited a release and it was optional there. That wasn't just time for developers to adapt to Scoped Storage. That should've also been time for Google to actually make it usable.

Just startet game developing (unity) on the side ! A time sink, but holy cow is it fun ! Any game devs out there?
How long did it take to master and how did you get startet ?

Our business partner just tried to deliver a motivational pep-talk to the dev team that ended up sounding more like a sermon. Instead of hearing we did a good job, we heard we could be doing a better job. Never mind that the project is rushed, lacking funding and built on an unstable codebase inherited from a proof of concept demo. I just lost all respect for the guy, who I thought appreciated how hard we've been working. Apparently he's just another administrative cog who wants to climb the ladder of success while standing on other people's hard work.

Right, no more extra miles for this project. Time to just coast on and see it sink in its own excrement.

#cursee&productivity

I'm beating the never ending tasks one after another past few days. Proud of myself and at the same time a bit tired.

Main problem is focus.

I can easily lose my focus along the way and then live the unproductive days for up to a week or more. I'm afraid to fall into that sink hole. 😣

So when I gained my focus, I try my best not to lose it. Which makes me lose track of other shits. Some shits are major like relationship responsibility, social etiquette etc. Some shits are minor like food and water. Nevertheless it's not very physically healthy nor spiritually.

I don't know how to easily switch on and off my focus. 😞

Maybe I should meditate 🤔 I don't know.

tldr: I am looking for recommendations for a basic website for my parents. GOTO question;

Pre-Story:
My parents have a small (offline) business. They have a website to give some general information and list their weekly offers.
When I felt that what has come out of the website-building tool (you know, clicky clicky stuff) looked a bit too early 2000's and is a total ripoff for what you get (almost 20€ per month), I created something with Google Sites for them. Feel free to roast me, but web development is not my field and now it looks much more modern, is mobile friendly and does what it is supposed to do. Weekly offers are edited in a google sheets file, which is embedded in the website. Not great, but this way my mom doesn't have to deal with editing a tables on the page - trust me, it won't look good. This also meant they could downgrade the hosting package to discard the clicky-tool and just the domain (maybe 1€ per month). The website itself is hosted for free by Google.

Some time ago GDPR became a thing and then I was tasked to have a look at it. (side note: I don't want to rant about being responsible for it, that's fine. My parents don't really ask me to do a lot for them.) You can't enter any data on the website, it's just very basic stuff and data protection wise there's just the "usual" stuff (cookies, embedded tools, logs). I added another site with a halfway complete privacy policy. Regarding the whole cookie issue (do not enforce unnecessary cookies) I couldn't find an easy solution. It's not 100%, but what can you really expect from a small business like this? I've seen worse.

Now to the question:
Can you recommend a good alternative to the current solution (Google Sites)?
It should be cheap (<3€/month incl. domain) and my parents should be able to make some basic changes (just text in predefined locations). I am not afraid to get my hands dirty - I can deal with some HTML, CSS, JS - but I don't want to sink a lot of time into this. No need for analytics or the like. Maybe a newsletter would be cool (with the weekly offers), but that's just a random thought of mine and definitely not necessary.

Thanks for reading :)

Postman is a horrible third party hacking tool. It’s use should be outlawed.

What a time sink.

Bad time management habits.
As for me, I've recently changed job and took some side projects and without some tricks (Getting Things Programmed) I would just end up shits creek without a paddle. I feel like I'm already in, but some tricks keep my numbers on the boards and I don't sink yet.
Also bad eating and no sport habits.

(imagine all of this said in Undoomed's "hey moron" tone)

Hey, moron, fuckin moron! How about if you're a noob with no actual programmer on your side, you just tell me so we can work it out together, instead of sending a moronic 4page "acceptance criteria" that pretend you know what you're talking about, and then bury me under loads of moronic noob questions that reveal you as thenmoron you are, all of that for a fuckin 50 quid?! I thought it's me being an idiot, not being able to do the task within two days timeframe, but now I see you're just too much of a moron to have any idea how much these things take. And now you nonchalantly mention a one-line one point from the four page document full of drivel, which (loads of moronism credit for me here) i didn't notice amongst all of that other mundane drivel, which actually like doubles the whole workload on the task, but your moronic document, which makes 3 parts of the same algorithm into three separate MILESTONES, makes this whole thing that nearly DOUBLES the workload into a shitty SEVENTH SUBPOINT of the completely unrelated first "milestone"?

FUCK YOU, YOU STUPID ROBBERY CHEAPFUCK, and fuck me for letting myself be tricked by all your fancy wordings that pretend you actually know what the fuck you are asking for, so i assumed you did, so I missed THE POINT, WHICH ACCORDING TO THE SEGMENTATION LOGIC OF THE WHOLE REST OF THE DOCUMENT SHOULD BE 3 SEPARATE FULL-SIZED MILESTONES, NOT A SINGLE SUBPOINT, YOU FUCKING FUCK!

... so much for still trying to at least a bit trust people.

FUCKING DISGUSTING MORONIC CHEAPSKATE FUCK.

and I can't even tell him to fuck off through the rectum he came here because he's all nice and polite so I would be the asshole!

"hey, please, can you build me a house?"
*house is basically finished*
"oh, great job, i love it, but i think you might have missed the fineprint in our contract that says that the house is supposed to stand inside an entry hall of a multibillionaire-sized mansion, so could we please sort that out and add it to the building real quick before i pay you the toolshed's worth we agreed on based on the contract? "

FUCK. HIM.
FUCK
FUCKFUCKFUCKSHITFUCKERYFUCKDISGUSTINGIDIOTICFUCKINGFUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!

i thought i can be a shitty liar and a con man, but this is some next level shit that would be totally beyond my abilities to pull off...

YES I KNOW IT'S MY FAULT I DIDN'T COMB THROUGH THAT BULLSIT "SPECS" OF HIS LETTER BY LETTER TO MAKE SURE THERE'S NO CON BULLSHIT LIKE THIS HIDDEN AMONGST ALL OF THAT MUNDANE SELF-EVIDENT PSEUDO-TECHNICAL DRIVEL, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

fucking disgusting moron, pretending all nice and innocent probably even to himself because he HAS NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT HE EVEN ASKS FOR.

i bet it's one of those pukefucks who get an overpriced contract for 50k without even knowing or caring what programming is, because "i'll just outsource the core functionality of the app for 50 quid to some naiive idiot who lives in the illusion that people are not diarrhorea-worthy pieces of feces, and this other third of the app to some other moron for hundred quid and then i somehow outsource gluing it together to some third poor sod, and that's 49.8k quid of pure profit for me, yay"

and now i'm torn between three options, just cancelling the "contract" with a comment saying "fuck off, you con man", or cancelling it with a lengthy explanation why he's a know-nothing piece of shit who conned me already into having done something worth about 5x more than his shitty "acceptance criteria" requests, or just start conning and bulshitting him back, which won't net me any money, and waste my time, but at least will also waste HIS time, which might be nice because he seems to be on a tight schedule so if i play this right i might have the chance to sink his whole contract which might be mighty nice satisfying...

FUCK THIS, ALL OF THIS, FUCK HIM, FUCK ME, FUCK ALL OF YOU, I SHOULD HAVE STARTED FUCKING OVER EVERYONE RUTHLESSLY A LONG TIME AGO BECAUSE FUCK THE WHOLE WORLD, WHY SHOULD I CARE WHEN NOBODY ELSE DOES, WHY SHOULD I BE DECENT WHEN NOBODY ELSE IS, AND IT ONLY ROYALLY BITES ME IN THE ASS.

stupid fucking lobotomized fuck, IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO SOMETHING, DON'T OFFER YOURSELF TO DO IT FOR MONEY AND THEN CON-SOURCE IT TO OTHERS YOU SHITTY BARFPILE!

FUCK.

My vague naive extreme understanding of interview questions are on a spectrum from situation a to situation b.

But what should the industry be doing? Is the industry just going wrong blindly copying big N companies hiring process without the same rationale? (e.g. they need computer scientists able to deal with problems specific to them at their size and that often means creating new tech, unreal problem solving abilities and cuh-rayzee knowledge)

a) stupid fucking theoretical shit that some people argue you won't ever need to be doing in practice for most companies, while giving you no ability to google, leetcode hard problems kind of stuff

b) practical work similar to what you'd be doing on the job, small bugs, tasks, pair programming on site with your potential future coworkers

Lots of people hate option a because it's puzzle/problem solving that isn't always closely related to what's on the job. Whiteboarding is arguably very much a separate skill. (Arguably unless it's like a big N company where you want computer scientists to deal with specific problems that aren't seen elsewhere, and you're making new tech to deal with your specific problems.)

We could go to the extreme of Option b, but it tends to trigger people into shitfits of "NO, HOW DARE YOU MAKE ME DO REAL WORK, BUT NOT PAY ME FOR IT AT THE INTERVIEW STAGE"

That's before we get into how to execute option b whether or not it's being given as a take home assignment (which is a huge pain in the ass and time sink, among other issues) vs a few hours at the potential workplace working with some of the future potential coworkers and soaking in the work environment (you have to figure out how to take the time off then)

Is it really just poor execution overall for the wrong use cases for the majority of the industry? What should the industry be doing in which cases.

Then this is all before HR screening with shit like where they might ask for more years of swift experience than its existed.

And here it comes bois, the famous Monday Morning Mumbling is back, for everyone's pleasure.

Do you remember your uni years, when you had wonderful coding lessons, and you learned sick languages ?

I do aswell, since I'm still in uni.

But why, WHY, IN ALL OF GOD THOUGHTS, DO I STILL HAVE TO TAKE MATHS LESSONS ?

It's my fourth fucking uni year, and I'm still supposed to deal with math lessons which are about what I learned 6 years ago. And guess what ? I still failed the test since I fucking don't understand a single shit in maths.

"Uuuuh if yu wan tu derivate a function u hav to multiply ur derivated function basic expression with the derivate itself lul xDDD so funi"

FUCK OFF DUDES I DON'T GIVE A SINGLE SICK BIRD SHIT ABOUT MATHS. I WASTED THREE YEARS OF MY LIFE LEARNING ABOUT BINARY TREES, MATHEMATICALS WAYS OF SPILLING YOUR CEREAL BOWL WHEN YOU HAVE TO LEAVE IN FIVE MINUTES, NUMERIC WAY OF OPTIMIZE YOUR SINK SPACE WHEN YOU'RE TOO LAZY TO DO THE DISHES, JUST LET ME FUCKING WRITE CODE INSTEAD OF ANNOYING ME WITH UNEXPLAINABLE MATHS SHIT NOW !

I know maths are important, okay ? But I'm so fucking tired of learning this shit again and again and still failing those shitty tests where they only give you maths problems without any other goal than messing with your grades.

Fuck this shit I'm pissed off on so many levels, I wasted tons of money on a private school to enhance my résumé history, and now I'm stuck with some strange "f'(x)" boi that will ruin my year.

RT's appreciated, if you recognised yourself in this story, don't forget to send some biscuits to my postal address.

TL;DR : Why wasting your time on theoritical lessons when you could use your time to learn new dynamic technos, like C++98 ?

Most of the web stuff I have done in the past have been PHP, Wordpress, cgi, etc. I read about nginx and was very impressed by what it accomplished in the last 20 years. Now I have a desire to play with this tech for fun.

What I want to do:
- create, manage, and launch minecraft servers
- provide a web interface for managing servers (I would like to learn how to make the server use the infrastructure of nginx to be managed like its other services)
- make this packaged so others can use this (probably on github)

I don't know anything about nginx other than it is really really cool, can serve massive amounts of web pages, and can do a whole lot more than that.

Question:
Is nginx suitable for this? Is this a big learning curve? Will I have fun doing this?

I am currently running a multi-instance minecraft server being managed by a piece of software called Crafty Controller. It is really neat. However, I am finding it buggy. I also see that the next version of this software will be behind a patreon. This is really disappointing. So this is spurring me to consider building something fun for myself, and if useful, for others.

I will most likely do very barebones and inflexible web interface that just gets the job done. I know enough to get by. So I assume I have a large learning curve ahead to do this.

Any advice? Is this going to turn into a large time sink?

Finally got myself out of that money, time-sink game... Must be summer...