"Let's do some pair programming! It will be fun!"

... Fuck no.

Either I start coding and you open a beer, or the other way around. And sure, I do not mind doing each other's code reviews. I respect your feedback.

But I can't look over your shoulder while you misspell keywords. When I write code, I search, try, debug and play at a high speed.

I'm an impressionist/surrealist writing messy passionate functions, breaking lots of things with broad paintbrush strokes before finishing it into detailed perfection. I remember all the places in the code I need to work on, and cover everything with tests.

You're a baroque coder, sometimes even a hyperrealist, with your two-finger 10 wpm typing, writing code strictly line-by-line, decorating every statement with the right checks & typehints in advance. You can not keep two functions in your head at the same time. You write tests reluctantly, but you hate that I barely plan. You plan everything, including your pee breaks.

As a coworker I respect you.

But there is no bigger hell than pair programming with you.

For 2 years I tried to make my boss pay me what I know I should be worth. Over the same time the team morale took a nosedive down into an avalanche.
Today I told him, that I am sick of being kept waiting and listening to excuses. I want the payment I know I deserve and I want it before the end of the year. I believe to have stayed perfectly calm and factual, even told him "I am sorry, I really tried it, but I cannot take this anymore".
He found a way to put a (literal) "fuck you" and a verbal middle finger into other people's mounts, so he "didn't say it himself" and shut down the meeting telling me to look for another job.

Actually I have not felt as satisfied in my job for a long time, as I have in that very moment.

Time for a new start.

6pm - arrive home from work, log into my computer and start working on side projects.

4am - Finally go to sleep after staying up all night setting up arch in a vm.

7am - Start drive to work in the snow and ice.

7:20am - car runs out of wiper fluid.

7:30am - round corner so that I’m driving towards the sun, windshield is covered in mud and I have 2% visibility.

7:35am - take off ramp towards gas station so I can buy fluid and wash window.

7:36am - Car mysteriously parked in center of off ramp, nearly smash it but have a narrow miss.

7:40am - can’t find the freaking pully in new car to pop hood

7:41am - found it.

7:50am - drove the back way to work because it cuts out traffic, but includes many steep hills that I forgot existed, come to a skid at bottom of one and am pushed out into the main road, luckily nobody is coming and I’m able to continue on my merry way.

8:01am - sit down in desk, lead staff person comes over evoking Lumbergh from Office Space and lets me know I need to be on time to work and that the snow doesn’t give me an excuse. I agree and smile and suck up and he leaves.

8:02am - pull out phone to write down notes about personal project that I thought of on drive here, phone dies. I forgot to plug it in last night.

8:04am - found power bank charger thing in desk but it uses a micro-b type usb and I only have usb type c on me.

8:10am - borrow usb from old headset in office surplus.

8:11am - writing notes. Have sudden realization that I didn’t shut down my vm and that when my computer went to sleep and subsequently locked it probably halted virtualbox and everything would be lost for the second time.

8:12am - got on devRant.

I just feel that I have to get this of my chest, because this have really me and my family really negative.
It have destroyed my will to be happy, sort of.

Well, my father have some kind of control behaviour. My whole life he has been angry on stuff that does not really matter
and I have always been the one that get all the shit - because I am the oldest. I was never allowed (maybee 3-4 times between age 8-15) to have any friends
over or stay with friends over night or after school. Because they "where bad and I would become like them".

I am happy that I meet my wife 6 years ago and moved away from home when I was 20, I kinda fled the situation from home to start my own life.
My father has always hated when boy/men had long hair and alot of beard - but that is something I always wanted to have. So when I moved from home
I start to let everything grow.

Two years ago, things got really fucked up when I did not shave all my beard of and cut down my hair because my mom had birthday. I did it the week after
because my brother graduated from school and we where going to visit, we did not want a repeat the situation from a couple of weeks before. After that I got
another job as a Linux sysadmin and started to grow the hair and beard again.

Last monday, my dad called and said that I am not welcome to visit them anymore. I am a "bad example" for my sibling
and he also said "you brother and sister does not feel so good (my sister fainted a couple of days before, which I did not know) so I have no time to care about you and your family"
I was stunned, I really wish that this was a joke but it is'nt.

I have always been bashed because of the choices I make in my life and for my own family (wife, and two kids + one more kid any day now)

When I choose to work with something that I love, they said that I am stupid because they basically think "that the PC is full of SATAN".
When they realized that I make more money than my parents combined they went silent.

I just wanted to write this shit of my chest, it is really fucked up and I am starting to loose the ability to have feelings - if you know what I mean.

Thank you devrant, for being one of the fun things I do, when I read all the rage, fucked up stories, hate, and so on. I do not feel alone :)

PS: I promise you, that you guys/gals will be the first one to know when my new kiddo arrives

Weirdest technical interview:

I was applying all over during my last semester in college (before graduating). This place was hiring a PHP developer for their “web store”. My interviewer invited me into her office, pulled out a laptop, and asked if I could walk her through some of the existing code. After I successfully did, she responded with “oh wow, we had no idea it was doing all of that!”.

The main room consisted of 6 folding tables lined with people on desk phones (probably support/sales). When I asked her where I would be working (mostly concerned about not being able to focus over the constant phone calls), she said that I would just share her desk in her office.

Then she asked if I could start the next day, without giving my internship any kind of warning that I’d be quitting so abruptly. She also asked me to start missing class, so I could spend more time at work. Saying things like “if you already have the job, why focus on school?”. When I asked who wrote that code, she told me that it was an out of state contractor that they’re trying to get rid of, because his rates were too high.

I told her that I would need a few days to think about it, which gave me time to call the other places that I had interviewed, but were still waiting to hear back. Luckily, when one of the places heard that I had been offered a job, they decided to rush their hiring process and offered me a job over the phone!

It’s been 6 years, and I am so thankful that I didn’t have to take that sketchy job.

In our office, everyone is placed so that we have a wall behind us. Initially, there was enough room behind us so that we can walk just fine.

Everything was fine till our manager didn't start making us some random visits and standing behind us just looking at our screens and making us feel unpleasant.

So one day we moved the tables so there is almost no room behind us. And we are aligned in a row with no space between the tables. Now if the manager decided to do it again he would have to struggle his way behind us.

Few days passed by and our manager finally showed he saw what we did, didn't say anything. It was clear that he wasn't happy about it. He tried to lean himself over the monitors to take a look but that was just not so as "good" as standing behind us...

A time passed and one day when we came to work we saw the tables moved forward some 15-20cm just enough to be able to move behind. Almost immediately we pulled them back as they were before.

We moved back and forward already few times and are currently playing cat and mouse with our manager.

Noone is saying anything just the tables are moving every 2-3 days or so. Let's see who is going to give up first hahaha

They announce the results and that was where the fucking plot twist was.

I was *not* on the list. I was devastated, to the point of depression. I refused to get over it, sulked at home, fell sick, skipped college for next two weeks straight. It took a few more days for me to recover.

After several visits from my friends and a lot of convincing, I decided to go back to college. I felt hopeless and had pretty much resigned to my fate. Being the idiot that I am, I missed several other interview opportunities during that interim when I was despairing-away.

Semester exams were about to start and I get a call from my staff saying I had cleared the coding exam for one of the companies that was coming for recruitment the next day. I had written this exam like several months ago and didn’t even remember having written it. It was such a short notice and I had zero time to prepare and my psyche didn’t want to(remember how I had resigned to my fate?).

I did manage to make it to the interview. I was expecting a tough interview (this company had a reputation for having tough interview rounds) but all I got was a bunch of tree and linked list and search algorithm related questions (internship interview). I had two rounds. It did really go well but I had learnt to not get my hopes up. Then I noticed other interviewees being called for a third round and they asked me to go home. I was like “meh”. I was used to it at that point in time.

Very unexpected to me, (but i’m pretty sure y’all have guessed at this point) I get a call saying, they have recruited me as an intern! 6 months later, I was working as an employee!

When I look back today, I realize that my current job, in every way, is waay better than the one I had so desperately wanted! The pay, the timing, the location, my actual job description, all of it! As a bonus I have an awesome manager who trusts me! I work with remotely with a team with such high standards and I learn something new everyday.

In my two years here, I have built a couple automation systems from scratch, I have mentored an intern and got him a full time offer, I have had two free two-week trips to the US and I have been promoted once! I’m so glad I was rejected that day (:

Thank you for reading!

This is my river baby, a laptop that was broken by its previous owner. It came to me with many dents (I covered those with stickers) and in a not booting state for about $300 after the guy dropped it in a river in South America.

- There is river sediment inside the screen, as well as the motherboard.
- If I put two sticks of RAM in it, the display artifacts all over the place and the computer crashes randomly. One slot must be empty.
- The ODD was filled with literal garbage. There is now a hard drive in its place.
- Running Windows through a VM would cause the WiFi to fail in a confusing manner. No one had ever seen that type of error before. I had to reseat the AirPort card.
- At one point, the power button stopped working, so I removed the keyboard and would start the computer by shorting two pads on the motherboard with a screwdriver.
- I’ve had all sorts of strange issues with it because of the water damage.
- I colored the keyboard with cellophane... 😅

After taking it apart for the 100th time, it’s now completely stable. I’ve had it for about 4 years, but it’s getting slow. I’m not sure what will come after the beloved river baby...

I'll get to my four words in a sec, but let me set the background first.

This morning, at breakfast, I fired up my trusty laptop only to get a fan failure warning.

Finally, after the three year old is asleep tonight, I'm able to start dismantling the case to get to the fan. I'm hoping it just needs cleaned out.

Hard drive, memory, and keyboard spread out over the kitchen table. I'm not even halfway done.

Guess what? Now I'm one of the lucky 3500 people to have a power outage at 9 pm. Estimated restore time: 2 am.

Sigh.

"All those tiny screws"

And a three year old in the house...

!rant
Handed over my keys and computer to my boss a moment ago and left the office for the last time. Spent 3 years there, and most of the people there came with me from my previous job I spent another 3 years at.
Feels heavy to leave a bunch of great people.

Two weeks until I start my job as a developer at a game company though.
Took me 6.5 years of work to finally get there.
Super stoked!

And I won't lie, some stickers on my new work laptop would not be a bad thing.

I had a prospective employer be late to every single interview we had scheduled. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they simply didn’t value my time.

I was in the process of moving and a recruiter called me to tell me a job I had been submitted for wanted to do a phone interview that day. Even though I was driving across the country in a box truck, I agreed to the interview. We arranged for the employer to call me at 2 PM. I figured it would give me a break from driving in the middle of the day anyway.

I pulled over at 1:45 and waited. At 2:15 I called the recruiter to verify the time. He said he would get in contact with the employer and call me back. At 2:45 I called the recruiter and told him I needed to get back on the road and we’d have to reschedule.

We rescheduled the call for a few days later at 1 pm. This time I got the phone number of the employer, so at 1:15 I called him. He apologized and said he lost track of time. Whatever, let’s just get this interview going.

He liked me on the phone, so he wanted to meet in person the next day. I was a bit irritated by the situation, but I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I showed up for my in person interview 15 minutes early and checked in with the receptionist. 30 minutes later I asked the receptionist when they were going to be with me as my interview was supposed to start 15 minutes ago. I was finally seen 5 minutes after that.

The interview was supposed to be a several hour affair where they were going to have me sign an NDA and show me some of the issues they were having to see if I could solve them. I had cleared my scheduled meetings for the afternoon so I could attend this lengthy interview.

After about 45 minutes of interviewing, the manager suddenly said that they needed to cut the interview short because he had just realized they needed to get something done that afternoon. He asked me if I would come back the next day to finish the interview.

I shook his hand and left, shaking my head the entire time. When I called my recruiter after I had calmed down, I let him know that I would under no terms be interested in a job with them. If they refused to acknowledge my time was worth something as a candidate, they would never respect it as an employee.

They still offered me the job and couldn’t fathom why I was upset about the situation. I’m very glad I didn’t take that job.

A quite normal Windows day:

Bios to Windows: "Go now! Get up!"

Windows to Bios: "Always slow with the young circuit boards."

"I've got something weird on screen."

Windows' answer: "Ignore it first."

Hardware assistant to Windows: "The user puts pressure. He wants me to identify this thing. Could be an ISDN card."

Windows: "Well, well."

Unknown ISDN card to all: "Will you please let me in?"

Network card to intruder: "You can't spread out here!"

Windows: "Quiet in the case! Or I'll cut both their support!"

Device Manager: "Offer compromise. The network card is allowed on Mondays, the ISDN card is on Tuesday."

Graphics card to Windows: "My driver retired yesterday. I'm crashing now."

Windows to graphics card: "When will you be back?"

Graphics card: "Well, not at first."

CD-Rom drive to Windows: "uh, I would have a new driver here..."

Windows: "What's ich´n supposed to do with it?!"

Installation software to Windows: "Leave it, I'll mach´ that already."

Windows: "That's nice to hear."

USB connection to interrupt management: "Alarm! Just been penetrated by a scanner cable. Request response."

Interrupt management: "Where are you coming from?"

USB connection: "I was in the computer right from the start. I'm joined by another colleague."

"You're not on my list." - "Say something."

Windows: "Hopefully there won't be another printer."

Graphics card: "The new driver twitches."

Windows: "We'll just have to get the old one out of retirement."

Uninstall program to new driver: "Go away."

Unwanted driver: "Fuck you."

Windows to Norton Utilities: "Kill him and his brood!"

Utilities to driver rests: "Sorry, we have to delete you."

Important system file: "Arrrrrrgghh!"

Windows on blue screen: "Gib´, the Norton Boys are over the top again."

Blue screen to user: "So, that's it for this week."

Excuse me for stealing your time

And I know it's way too long

Stop reading and JUST start writing code.

I've been stuck in coding limbo because I kept looking for the right answer.

And I've learnt over time that the right answer will come to you only when you know what exactly you're looking for.

So start coding.

On being a woman in tech...

You lads probably have (and my fellow ladies certainly have) heard of "impostor syndrome" and, if you don't experience it, you possibly wonder what living with it is like.

Here's an example from this weekend.

Be me, about 5 years into my career, graduated from a top college, feeling decent but still unsure of skill.

Company gets a 4 week trial of an online learning website. It includes optional assessments, so that you know where in the video lessons to start. Rankings are novice, proficient, expert.

Hear from our QA that he got ranked "proficient." Which is a pretty broad category, but I become super afraid that I'll also be assessed as "proficient" and it will look like I have the same dev skills as a fucking QA (our management overlords can see our scores).

Boyfriend has me do some deep breathing before starting the test, because it's obvious how stressed I am.

Finally take it and get ranked "expert", in the 97th percentile, even though some technical difficulties made me miss four questions in a row. I decide to use my do over, and get ranked "expert" again, this time in the 99th percentile.

You'd think I'd be like, "Lawl, I can't believe I'd get the same score as our QA!" And there is some of that. But there's also the thoughts of, "that test could have been more thorough," "that score wasn't real because I resaw a question and got the right answer the second time," and "99th percentile isn't that great on a platform where new developers are over represented."

And this is all despite the fact that, if you were to ask someone how confident I am, the answer would probably "confident as hell."

Not saying this to start any fights. Figured it could be some interesting insight into a world that some people don't experience! (not that males aren't allowed to have impostor syndrome!)

You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.

I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.

I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.

Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.

I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.

But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.

He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.

Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.

The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.

Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.

I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.

Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it.

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.

Yesterday I fucked up big time.
First time in my career (I’m 23).

I just started working this week at a new company startup that had no programmers before me. They have a bunch of websites under their control that were on all different hosting solutions, and we decided to move them all to AWS.
I moved a few and was managing the folder rights on the server.
What happened next made my heart skip a few beats.
Bear in mind I’m not an expert in Linux.
I wanted to chmod to the folder I was currently in, and typed ‘sudo chmod -R 770 /‘ thinking for a while that the ‘/‘ would do it on my current dir.

Fuck. As I saw what was happening I pressed ctrl + c as fast as I could. But the damage had been done.

Fast forward a couple hours I deleted the broken instance, and created a new one from scratch. Had to do everything again but managed to do it in just a couple hours, moving as fast as I could without making such stupid mistakes again.

I was honest about it from the first minute it happened, and told my boss right away that I fucked up and had to start over, with a couple of hours of downtime.
Luckily not much was lost and I took a snapshot right after I was finished and will look into auto backups next week.

As I was walking to the store, I found yet another piece of evidence of nature rape (aka fucking nature by littering of harmful substances). Just like last time I brought it home for proper disposal.

But if I ever find the motherfucker who did this, I have a nice punishment for you. I'll knock you unconscious, drag you home, take your phone and desolder its battery. Then I'll strap a plastic bag around your stupid face, and put the battery in there while it's being shorted. Quickly it'll heat up and you'll start to turn blue with that little bag being your only oxygen source. And when that battery puffs, boy are you going to fucking gasp it all in. Hopefully that'll be poisonous enough to kill you on the spot. If not, I'll have some fun watching you die from oxygen deprivation. Or I'll jam that very same AA battery that you dropped down your throat - you choose.

Call me a psycho all you want, but what does that make you, whoever attempted to further fuck nature by uncaringly dropping a battery on the sidewalk? Oh and let's not mention the results of it - a heatwave that's been going on for over a month now. Thank you so much for bringing the place that you deserve to be in - hell!

So i've been put in charge of bringing the devs together to form a small dev team, instead of having 3 separate devs (including me) sitting apart on separate projects. The idea was to have us talk more, work together more, learn more about the other projects, reuse more code etc.

(I've been arguing to let us do this for a while)

So I asked my manager could we move to the 4 desks in the corner, so we can have our own space, talk without having to book a meeting room each time etc. Its also a bit quieter over there and we all really need that in our noisy office.

Manager sent me an IM today while I was working from home to tell me we can have the desks. Was super happy, messaged the devs to tell them they can start moving.

Just got a message from one of them to say our manager has started moving his stuff over too. Seems he agreed with me that it is quieter over there and he doesn't like the noise either ... so he's joining us.

A huge part of the move was us wanting to work on side projects to automate and speed up various things in the team, that he has been against. We know we can make huge improvements but he doesn't see it. He's only interested in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

So now we have our space, and anytime we try to work on something we are actually interested in, we'll have a little voice in the corner to pop up and point out what other things he deems more important and tell us to stop wasting our time.

Pretty fucking annoyed to be so happy and then get shot down like that. Happy weekend everyone!!

8:50am aight alarm clock, give me 5 more minutes

8:55am ok lets round it to 9, wake me up then

9:00am aight enough. lets just sleep for 1 more minute since 9:00 is too round

9:43am fuck

9:44am ok its time to finally study for the upcoming college exam

9:45am nothing but a fresh day to start studying for college

9:46am eh i dont have a lot to study so I'll do it in 2pm, I'll code my project instead

2pm hold on 5 more minutes until i finish coding this feature and then I'll study

5pm where the fuck is this bug coming from

5:504pm goddamn i found it

6:36pm holy shit its already over 6pm, I'll study at night

7:42pm ok its night now, time to study but I'll do it when i fix all bugs

8:14pm ok bugs fixed, commit. lets study

8:15pm you know what, im way too tired and exhausted from this coding, I'll take a short 30 minute break and then I'll study

10:15pm ok im feeling fresh bois lets study now theres not too much

1:31am damn this movie was good

1:32am fuck i forgot to study, I'll do it tomorrow

2:10am *posts this rant*

Boss comes to me with an idea, we use a spreadsheet to store certain sets of links for clients, sometimes with dozens of links, he wants us to be able to push a button and open all the links in the sheet. I'll admit I'm not exactly proficient in excel but said I'd look into it.

I came up with a macro which seemed to work for a while but there were a few links now and then that didn't want to open due to the way excel apparently checks the links prior to actually opening them. I told my boss that I'd look into a better solution but was slammed in office with scheduled projects.

I ended up taking time at home over the next week learning how to make this happen in Python. After a week I've got a CLI Python app which takes in an excel workbook and asks the user to select a sheet. Well employees don't like CLI so they asked for a GUI. I had never made anything with a GUI before since I'm not a software developer, anything I had previously written was written for me so it didn't need a GUI to be useful.

Spent another two weeks at home developing this thing and finally got a working solution. Now several employees are using my app as part of their daily job, saving them well over an hour of just clicking links in a spreadsheet.

Boss goes on a long rant about how he appreciates me and is thankful I was able to figure this out in my own time and save him money. So I say "If you really wanna show you appreciate me, you could approve that raise I've been asking for."

He replies, "Haha, yeah, but that's not gonna happen."

(I and THE back end developer, and I make less than the copywriting interns, time to start looking)

Story time. My first story ever on devRant.

To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)

My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!

My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!

I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!

At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!

Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.

Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...

Thanks for reading ...

I don't care how technically competent or how much experience you have...

A list of files is in alphabetical order 99% of the fricking time.

If I ask you to open "index.html" and have to watch over your shoulder as you hunt for it in the C,D,E section... and then you quickly scroll down to S,T,U and start looking there... I swear I will jam that wireless mouse where the sun don't shine.

This story starts over two years ago... I think I'm doomed to repeat myself till the end of time...

Feb 2014
[I'm thrust into the world of Microsoft Exchange and get to learn PowerShell]

Me: I've been looking at email growth and at this rate you're gonna run out of disk space by August 2014. You really must put in quotas and provide some form of single-instance archiving.
Management: When we upgrade to the next version we'll allocate more disk, just balance the databases so that they don't overload in the meantime.

[I write custom scripts to estimate mailbox size patterns and move mailboxes around to avoid uneven growth]

Nov 2014
Me: We really need to start migration to avoid storage issues. Will the new version have Quotas and have we sorted out our retention issues?
Management: We can't implement quotas, it's too political and the vendor we had is on the nose right now so we can't make a decision about archiving. You can start the migration now though, right?
Me: Of course.

May 2015
Me: At this rate, you're going to run out of space again by January 2016.
Management: That's alright, we should be on track to upgrade to the next version by November so that won't be an issue 'cos we'll just give it more disk then.

[As time passes, I improve the custom script I use to keep everything balanced]

Nov 2015
Me: We will run out of space around Christmas if nothing is done.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: The question is not how much space... it's when do you want the existing storage to last?
Management: October 2016... we'll have the new build by July and start migration soon after.
Me: In that case, you need this many hundreds of TB
Storage: It's a stretch but yes, we can accommodate that.

[I don't trust their estimate so I tell them it will last till November with the added storage but it will actually last till February... I don't want to have this come up during Xmas again. Meanwhile my script is made even more self-sufficient and I'm proud of the balance I can achieve across databases.]

Oct 2016 (last week)
Me: I note there is no build and the migration is unlikely since it is already October. Please be advised that we will run out of space by February 2017.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: Like last time, how long do you want it to last?
Management: We should have a build by July 2017... so, August 2017!
Me: OK, in that case we need hundreds more TB.
Storage: This is the last time. There's no more storage after August... you already take more than a PB.
Management: It's OK, the build will be here by July 2017 and we should have the political issues sorted.

Sigh... No doubt I'll be having this conversation again in July next year.

On the up-shot, I've decided to rewrite my script to make it even more efficient because I've learnt a lot since the script's inception over two years ago... it is soooo close to being fully automated and one of these days I will see the database growth graphs produce a single perfect line showing a balance in both size and growth. I live for that Nirvana.

Still trying to get good.

The requirements are forever shifting, and so do the applied paradigms.

I think the first layer is learning about each paradigm.

You learn 5-10 languages/technologies, get a feeling for procedural/functional/OOP programming. You mess around with some electronics engineering, write a bit of assembly. You write an ugly GTK program, an Android todo app, check how OpenGL works. You learn about relational models, about graph databases, time series storage and key value caches. You learn about networking and protocols. You void the warranty of all the devices in your house at some point. You develop preferences for languages and systems. For certain periods of time, you even become an insufferable fanboy who claims that all databases should be replaced by MongoDB, or all applications should be written in C# -- no exceptions in your mind are possible, because you found the Perfect Thing. Temporarily.

Eventually, you get to the second layer: Instead of being a champion for a single cause, you start to see patterns of applicability.

You might have grown to prefer serverless microservice architectures driven by pub/sub event busses, but realize that some MVC framework is probably more suitable for a 5-employee company. You realize that development is not just about picking the best language and best architecture -- It's about pros and cons for every situation. You start to value consistency over hard rules. You realize that even respected books about computer science can sometimes contain lies -- or represent solutions which are only applicable to "spherical cows in a vacuum".

Then you get to the third layer: Which is about orchestrating migrations between paradigms without creating a bigger mess.

Your company started with a tiny MVC webshop written in PHP. There are now 300 employees and a few million lines of code, the framework more often gets in the way than it helps, the database is terribly strained. Big rewrite? Gradual refactor? Introduce new languages within the company or stick with what people know? Educate people about paradigms which might be more suitable, but which will feel unfamiliar? What leads to a better product, someone who is experienced with PHP, or someone just learning to use Typescript?

All that theoretical knowledge about superior paradigms won't help you now -- No clean slates! You have to build a skyscraper city to replace a swamp village while keeping the economy running, together with builders who have no clue what concrete even looks like. You might think "I'll throw my superior engineering against this, no harm done if it doesn't stick", but 9 out of 10 times that will just end in a mix of concrete rubble, corpses and mud.

I think I'm somewhere between 2 and 3.

I think I have most of the important knowledge about a wide array of languages, technologies and architectures.

I think I know how to come to a conclusion about what to use in which scenario -- most of the time.

But dealing with a giant legacy mess, transforming things into something better, without creating an ugly amalgamation of old and new systems blended together into an even bigger abomination? Nah, I don't think I'm fully there yet.

Every time I mess up my git branch I usually find that its pretty futile to fix it with fancy commands like 'git reset', 'git prune', 'git rebase', etc. I usually find it easier to just start over from scratch.

They should really add a command for that

'git fuck-it-start-over'

I've uncovered the complot.

I clearly remember buying my first monitor, it was 15 inch, 1024x768. Then I went to a 19 inch 1680x1050 one, then 24 inch 1080p, then 27 inch 1440p...

Now I used two 32 inch 4K screens at work... and I come home, and the three 27 inch screens look a bit smallish, with the old 24 inch one being absolutely tiny on my desk.

It wasn't that tiny when I still owned the 15 inch screen? And my 5.5 inch phone doesn't feel as big as when I bought it either?

So the complot... All monitors slowly shrink over time, and they start shrinking faster when new monitors are brought into the household.

Get children! You'll have so little time over for your fun projects that you force yourself to stop procrastinating and start accomplishing truly amazing things in just 5 minutes here and 20 minutes there.

We were starting a libre software project and needed some basic stuff like email accounts, cloud storage, calendars for scheduling, etc. So we start to talk about using services that didn't agreed the patriotic act of the USA. That lead to the omnipresent topic of Google's control over our lives. Then we moved to Microsoft's crimes against humanity for preinstalling windows, and at the time when we were discussing if Steve Jobs were a fraud or just a salesman, we realized it was getting late and we had nothing set or even decided. So we create a Google account and went home.

I got my very first dev job! After first making it to an interview where I didn't think I did all too well, I got a boost when on the 22nd December they called me asking for a referral. I gave them one but the person could not be contacted before the 23rd - close to xmas.

After an agonizing wait over the xmas period I finally got the call today. One hell of a way to start the new year!

I got a summer job (full time student) doing actual coding! I am so pumped!!!

1. Fucking MySQL database clusters.

There's nothing fun about MySQL clusters. Sometimes they start producing deadlock errors for no apparent reason... well, there's probably a reason, but it's never a transparent easy to find reason.

What was even less fun is that those errors took down a Sentry server. When your error log server goes down through ddos from your database messages, it's time to rethink your setup.

2. Wiring up a large factory with $2 arduino clones, each with a $2 esp8266 wifi chip, with various sensors for measuring flow of chemical solutions (I wanted cheap real time monitoring as an early warning system next to periodic sampling).

The scaling issue was getting over 500 streaming wifi signals to work in a 55c moist slightly corrosive atmosphere with concrete and steel everywhere, and getting it all into a single InfluxDB instance for analysis.

my story so far

Hey guys. i just wantes to share my story becoming something i think is like a dev.
I was always interested in solving problems. my grandfather has a company with a bit over a 100 employees. one day i decided to start working there. he needed someone to build up the erp system (mostly maintenance). about a month after i started he decided to get a new erp system because the one he had would not fill his needs. not knowing how big this got i told him that i want to build it up. from getting the orders over production with machines to billing.
he agreed. after a short time we knew that even this new system does not fullfill our needs. but it was so damn expensive. i told my grandfather: trust me, i am handling this. no further costs. and i started to learn programming. i learned night and day (visual basics.net, sql, c#). since then i wrote about 8 additional modules for the system in coorperation with the users. today, 3 years later we are far ahead our market in terms of transparency and information flow. i worked very hard for this and it is a great feeling to see that the things i do help my colleagues and are used.

i never learned this stuff in school and i know that i cannot tell that i am a professional programmer.

but when someone asks me i tell them i am a programmer because my solutions work and i think i deserve to call me that.

thanks for reading :)

spent 7-8 months looking for work (did a few freelance jobs in the mean time), spent what's worth of days on LinkedIn.. no reply at all, talked to recruiters got declined over the phone after 2-3 mins of call time..

Applied to a company branch in my home country nailed the 4+1(code challenge) interviews, will be leaving this Saturday morning (in 2days) now the bloody bastards start to reply and send offers for positions they have, when I clearly have to decline as I don't want to be left empty handed..

fuck you Sam, Jake and the other pricks that decided it is OK to reply after 3-4 months.. go fuck yourselves with a horse's dick you piece of crap.. After you're done, go shoot yourselves with the gun for ugly dumb animals!!! Hate you!

Kind regards, dev-nope!

Well, some time in the future, i will have to sit a computer science exam with C#. It can't be that bad, right?

Wrong.

To start off, Visual Studio 2013. Why the fuck someone would use this pile of garbage in 2018. I have no fucking clue why any semi-competent IT department would decide to skip TWO fucking releases of the software and decide, that it's okay to just roll with it. It's okay to not have any updates. It's okay to just no care at all.

I literally brought in my laptop with a VM installed since Visual Studio 2017 is really superior to the crap from 5 years ago just to do my coursework most lessons.

-------

Second issue, you know thoes desks where the monitor is literally under the desk and you get a small little window to see the monitor? Yeah, well I will have to take my proper exam in one of these all over the fucking room. Pic related.

Today we had a mini mock - - it went something like this:
- There was glare from the glsss on the desk because of the lights in the room and literally the monitor itself.
- The glass was beyond fucking pig filthy.
- There was neck pain from my back because i was constantly looking down and bending over the see the screen.
- There was eye strain because the document given to us was a tiny piece of paper with tiny writing and the monitor was far away and the paper was close i couldn't focus my eyes.
- Literally every desk was as bad as the next.
- I did fuck all work because i just couldn't focus because of the things above.
You can tell how great that felt.

If i was in a room with a man (or if it was a woman, let's just pretend she has balls), who was the creator of the room i just described, Hitler, my College's IT staff and other really bad people while having infinite ammo, i would continuously shoot the creator in the balls while not giving a shit about anything else.

Forever.

Until heat death.

Thanks for reading.

Man I really hate it when people think that coding doesn't take any concentration and can just interrupt you while you're thinking about how to solve problems

So the other day I was working on how to solve a problem with filtering data with JS, and I had to urgently update one of our pages on our website. I had to update that page according to the content of a Word file, which I didn't check how long it was.

About 15 minutes later everything was ready and published, so I set myself back to my problem.

I get an email from her, "you mixed up things" and she showed up in my office. "There are four pages in this word doc and you copied wrong parts", I was like "ok, I'll fix it". Fixed it two minutes later, went back to code.

Received another email, with another subject, again with another problem. Start getting pissed off for being interrupted for nonsense. Fixed it instantly and put my manager in the email loop so she is aware my other colleague pisses me off.

And again, another direct email "can you fix this?!". I started ignoring her requests because I need some work to be done, and I already lost 2 hours. Got again interrupted by her personal visit to point me which things are wrong, repeating everything twice as I am stupid to her. Man I can't code in peace. I fixed her shit, exactly as she wants and decided to pay my manager a visit to tell her I'm really pissed about being interrupted all the time.

Five minutes before the end of the day, she comes panicking in the office about ANOTHER WORTHLESS issue. Told her it's nothing and went away.

Day is over, thought it was over - a whole afternoon spent correcting her fucking page that gets 10 visits a year.

On the next morning, "there is something wrong with your form, can you check it?!!?" with an attached screenshot. FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU STOP ANNOYING ME WITH YOUR FUCKING SHIT CANT WORK ANYMORE. PUT YOUR FUCKING PAGE RIGHT UP YOUR ASS AND FIX IT YOURSELF.

She doesn't have any access to the back end.

Guess I'll have to fix it then...

I've been working exclusively from home for over 2 years now. I've been seeing several posts from people talking about adjusting to working from home, so I figured I would compile a list of tips I've learned over the years to help make the adjustment easier for some people.

1) Limit as many distractions as possible. WFH makes it much easier to get distracted. If you have roommates/family members at home, ask them politely to leave you alone while you're working. Make sure the TV is turned off, put your phone on silent, etc.

2) Take regular breaks. I find it easier to accidentally go hours without taking a real break from work. Try working in half hour intervals, and then taking 5-10 minute breaks. Read an article, watch a youtube video, grab some coffee/tea, etc.

3) When you eat lunch, eat it away from your computer. I often find myself eating lunch trying to wrap up fixing a bug, which makes it feel like I never really "took a lunch." Lately I've been trying to step away and do something else completely unrelated to work.

4) Get ready for work like you normally would. It's very easy to wake up, throw on your favorite pair of sweats and sit at the computer with messy hair half awake "ready" to start the day. Instead try doing your normal morning routine before sitting at your computer. It will help your mind and body go into "it's time to work" mode.

5) Keep your work area clean. I find it very difficult to work when my workspace is cluttered. Studies have shown working in a messy place tend to make us less efficient.

6) Keep your work area work related. Try to only have the things you need for work in your workspace. If you're working from your personal computer this can be difficult. I always end up with camera/music equipment left over from the previous night's photo editing/jam sessions. So try to clean off your desk when you're done for the night so it's ready for work in the morning.

7) Prepare for meetings. I have alarms set 10 minutes in advance so I can go from programming mode to meeting mode. During this time I'll go to the bathroom, grab a snack, water, mute all my email notifications, close any non essential programs, get my code ready if I need to present it.

Stuff is hard & stressful right now, but hopefully these tips will make it a bit easier. If anyone else has any good tips please share them.

HR, why so stupid?
I'm currently living in Sweden, want to move to Austria (significant other is studying there, I'm finishing my studies over here)
Me: *Applies for a Junior Java Dev job via company's online platform*
HR1: We like your CV, be here for an interview in person in 5 days.
Me: That's expensive, can we do it via Skype? I'm still in Sweden.
HR1: How are you planning on working in Austria while living in Sweden?
Me: I'm not. I'll move to Austria in 2 months. That's when I'd like to start working with you.
Me: *wonders why they skipped that part in my CV/cover letter as it's clearly stated there*
HR1: ....
Me: Hello?
Me: Helloooo?
HR2: We're sorry to tell you that the position of Senior Database Engineer has been filled. May we use your CV for other potential openings at our company?
Me: No worries, I applied for Junior Java Dev anyways. You may use my CV for other openings.
HR2: Oh, sorry for the confusion. I just mistyped the job title.
Me: *WTF? That was a machine-generated answer. Your system filed my application in the wrong place. You didn't mistype shit.*
HR1: Oh good for you. We've suddenly found out we need a Junior Java Dev as well as a Senior Database Engineer. Do you have time for a Skype interview this afternoon?
Me: ....
HR1: Hello?
Me: ....
HR1: Tomorrow then?

#First

I joined a start up and worked after college hours as an intern over there. I would usually bunk my college and go to my internship. I had limited knowledge at that moment. I worked very hard over there because I wanted (still want) to gain practical knowledge.

Almost a month into it and I had to take a break from it because I had college work. Rejoined the same start up during my vacations. Worked quite a lot and learnt quite some stuff. I continued the internship after my one month vacation for another month once my college started. All this while I was not being paid, not even a little bit of allowance. But that didn't matter because I wanted to learn

Fast forward six months to November 2016. I have been placed in an MNC through my college placements. One day I get a call from this start up owner(we had become good acquaintances by then) if I was willing to work as a paid intern while I was working on the projects that the company landed (so I guess as a free-lancer) and as an unpaid intern while I was working on the company projects. I agreed. Jump to December. I have joined and started working on an Android project of this very big company.

At time point, I should inform you'll that I'm not very good at Android and that the company size is very small. Company owner plus the tech lead in one city (where I'm from) and another two full time employees in another city. Out of which one quit to start his own company apparently. The start up would primarily employ interns and provide exposure to them while getting their work done.

Back to the story. The tech lead vaguely assigns everyone their work. Everyone over here includes new interns and previous interns like me who will get paid some amount. 3-4 days into the project, the tech lead quits. The tech lead and the company owner call three of us and says that one of you will have to be a project manager for this project. And then both of them and 2 of my colleagues look at me. And I don't know what to say. I hesitate initially because it's too much responsibility but agree to it finally.

The next day I come to office and read about the project thoroughly and catch up with my colleagues about the progress. The entire day I'm panicking about what I'm going to do. In the evening, my boss tells me that we have to go for a meeting with the client for whom we are doing this project. At this moment, the shit out of me has been scared. Mostly because I don't know what the fuck am I going to do over there apart from being stupid and asking dumb questions. So we reach the client's office and wait for him. The entire time I'm thinking to myself that I'm going to drown this company by opening my mouth. Surprisingly, all the questions that I asked seemed legitimate and I asked a lot of questions. And so I didn't drown the company after all...phew!

It's been more than a week. And holy fuck! What a pain it is to manage people. Half of my time is spent on updating excel sheet about their progress, where are they stuck and what is needed. And the other half about thinking what the fuck am I doing or how am I gonna do it.

So to sum up, intern-turned-freelancer-turned-project manager who has no idea what the fuck is going on. Seems pretty crazy, don't you think.

Story, !rant.

This memory came up as I was commenting on another rant, and thought it was worthy of a better retelling.

So about a year or two ago, I had just gotten a Software Defined Radio, and was tinkering with it and looking around for cool stuff I could do with it. After stalking planes for a while (caught a 747 over my area 😎) I saw this program that decoded satellite images of earth, coming from the NOAA satellites. I thought this was amazing.

So I waited until one was over my area and let the software do its magic. The image was not great, since I had this set up on the first floor and there was a lot of material between me and the satellite.

So I came to the brilliant conclusion that I'd leave the program on automatic more (it will start sampling when the satellite is near) on my terrace, which should yield better results, right?

Perhaps. Who knows. Anyways, couple hours pass and we are running late to a family dinner. So we book it. Family dinner was great, good food and all, and was having fun, so never thought about my poor laptop, sitting alone in the night.

But then, when I was walking home in the rain... It hit me. I started running. I couldn't believe what I had done. Fast forward five minutes, and I'm out of breath, but home. I run upstairs, and see the laptop just sitting there, lid open, no lights on, and of course soaked right through.

I couldn't believe it. My only piece of tech at the time, and my only avenue for programming, gone. And I was 15, so I wasn't getting another one any time soon. Took it inside and drained the water out of it, and just left it there lying on its side.

Next day it worked just fine 🤣 the battery on my laptop only lasted max one hour, so by sheer luck it had lost power before the rain came. That is the one time I have to thank that battery for being such utter trash.

Right after high school, I was looking for an internship. I mailed my cv to a bunch of local companies and got quite a few responses. Two of the companies invited me for an interview.

The first one was a somewhat big company and they would have had me working on some angular web app. The other one on the other hand was a small team of 6 people, 2 of which were the bosses.

It was one of the nicest interviews I could have ever imagined. We just sat down and talked about what kind of programming experience I already had and what I wanted to learn.

They hired me right away. The internship was just 6 weeks and after that my studies in computer science were gonna start. They offered me a part time position with flexible hours and I gladly agreed.

I've been working at that company for over a year now and it couldn't be going better.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

In my last job they required us to turn on a task timer for every little thing. Remembering to do that, and to turn it off, was a royal pain. First I had to look up which task it is, start the timer, stop the timer, find the next task and repeat, then flip back to the first task. Lots of open browser tabs within tab groups to keep track of it all. And if I came up short or went over on budget, there was a “conversation” with management to account for discrepancies. Then I had to go by memory and try to reconstruct the “missing time” accurately enough to be convincing.

Now that I’m freelancing, I try to keep up the habit because it does have merit for tracking estimates and actuals, but now it’s just me to answer to for discrepancies and I can fudge the numbers as I see fit. The time records did, however, save my bacon in a recent dispute.

The more depressed you get over the current state of software is how you know you made it.When you start making your own opinions and say"wow these people are full of shit"

Primary example, the web development overblown bullshit. Fuck me dude, you really don't need that full featured react, vue, angular framework to make sense of shit. You are going over the top for fucking ajax functionality and state management that you could do by yourself without needing to learn a full framework, by the time you finish learning react you probably would have been better served with standard vanilla af JS and server side rendering.

Our world is full of fads and many talented people that perpetrate them. Its fine, it is a the nature of the beast. But a lot...A LOT of software is very POORLY written. And adding levels of abstraction over a very broken paradigm (web in this case) does and will not make it better.

Basically I am fucking hating being a web developer and want to go back to a time in which we cared about how much memory consumption our applications made as well as not worrying about the fucking frontend having the ability to implement machine learning.

I want to run sublime.exe and being sure that it is a native application to my system and not using a fucking contained web browser to implement my fucking text editor. With 20mb of ram at most instead of 500mb WTF.

I knew I made it when I could read comments on Hacker news and reddit and say "this idiot is full of shit", I knew I made it when I would sigh heavily at the idea of having another project rather than having a fan girl attitude towards it.

I knew I made it when people writing about software development meant shit to me rather than the wonder of what the fuck they were talking about.

I knew I made it when getting laid was more important to me than fucking around with code.

pussy > code
Fuck you.

Recently I've been working on a side project and I've been working on it a lot over the last week, with lots of late nights.

My girlfriend said to me the other day, "do you not wanna give it a rest for a bit, you'll be starting your new job soon, you'll get fed up of it".

I then explained to her that, programming is on of those few careers where you'll continue to do programme and do side projects, even after a full day of it, and I couldn't imagine it any other way.

I can't wait to start work.. but then I also don't wanna lose out on project time 🙁

So… I released v2.0.0 of devRant UWP a few weeks ago.
Then I got a lot of reports of problems on Windows 10 Mobile and older (than 1809) versions of Windows 10 on Desktop.
I decided to resubmit v2.0.0-beta16 to the store, and try to find the issue in the update… I didn't find it.
The code seems the same as the working version (at least the part I try to test is 100% equal).

So it seems I fucked up the vs project.

This means that to find the issue I can spend weeks to search it over and over inside the latest project (using shitty emulators of older Windows 10 builds to debug it), or I could just restore it to the old v2.0.0-beta16 (released in august) and implement again every single new feature and fix (something like 5 new features, dozens of improvements, changes and bug fixes).

In any case, this will require a lot of time (which I don't have at this moment).
I'm really sorry for this inconvenience, I know some of you use my client daily (~3.000 users I guess), I'm really glad someone likes it, and thanks a lot for the awesome reviews and feedback, but stable v2 (v2.1.0 at this point) will be available not earlier than in February.

Probably some of you have already download v2.0.0 while it was available in the store, and maybe it works on your device (please let me know in the comments below if you did, how is it going, and also if you like the new features and improvements).

After this epic fail, and more than 1 year (way too much) of v2 public beta, I want to throw the current project in the trash, and start it from scratch.
Which means I will start to work on v3 as soon as you will see v2.1.0 in the store, making it faster, lighter and with better support for the latest Windows 10 (Fluent Design and not) features, dropping the support for the very old UWP API.

Thanks for your attention.

Have a good day (or night)!

Fucking windows! I am so fucking done with this microsoft bullshit!

Hear me out here, i am a gamer. I need windows because it has the games (and software to aid those games) unlike any other platform. But windows 10 is basically already phishing andmalware at this point. I stuck to win 7 because it had a start menu and didn't totally drive me up the wall.

Just a short list of their bullshits: ads in the explorer window, ads in your taskbar reminders, data mining like it is nobodies business and trying to hide it, sharing my wifi access with friends (wtf), the fucking retarded new start menu, the crappy fullscreen apps which have less functionality than the actual proper desktop applications that you need to config what you want, and even then pushing multiple updates that simply broke peoples pc's. Fuck that, ill stick to 7.

They are making win10 worse by the week making it unlikely i will ever join that hell, and they are also aiming to force me there. Making windows store exclusives and dx12 only games. What am i supposed to do against that?! The current releases don't bother me much but fuck i figure it is a matter of time until the newest katamari game is their exclusive and i nanananana katamari damacy all over their platform.

And well all alternative os's are just out of the question unless vulkan rendering gets the upper hand. Then i'd switch to whatever stable distro and learn about our new penguin based overlords languages.

For now i will just stick to win7, suck on my thumb while in fetal position and hope it just all goes away.

Why is it that when someone mentions they really like windows or that someone should/might want to install windows, hardly anything happens (maybe some funny comments from linuxers but no hate or anything) (same goes for OSX) but when someone makes the same comment about linux, they get burned into the ground as a 'Linux nazi'? I am not only talking about devRant (it happens here sometimes as well) but also about my study and real life.

If someone would mention that it might be useful to install windows or OSX over Linux, it was all good but the FUCKING SECOND I mention it might be useful (or other linuxers) to use/install Linux, we are immediately put away as Linux nazi's.

On devRant I've tried to keep this shit to myself because I don't want to start wars but I think I am going to quit doing that and actually show my fucking opinion. Yes, that might also result in some people seeing me as a fucking linux nazi but fuck being burned into the ground every time I give my opinion regarding this.

Fucking hell. (nothing personal to any devRanters by the way but I am starting to get really tired of this shit).

A few years ago I was browsing Bash.org, and a user posted that he'd physically lost a machine.

A few weeks ago, I'd switched my router out for OPNSense. I figured it was time to start cleaning up my network.

Over the course of tracking down IP addresses and assigning statics to mac addresses, I spotted an IP I didn't recognize.

Being a home network, I'm pretty familiar with everything on the network by IP, so was a little taken aback.

I did some testing, found out that it was a Linux box. Cool.

I can SSH into it. Ok.

Logs show that it's running fine, no CPU/Memory/Harddrive issues. Nice.

So where is it?

Traceroute shows its connected directly to the router... Maybe over an unmanaged switch...

Hostname is "localhost"... That's no help.

I've walked the network 4 times now, and God knows where it is.

I think maybe I'll just leave it alone. If it ain't broke...

Completed Angular 2 course on codeschool, really liked improvements and simplicity of Angular over Angularjs. Decided to do quick start guide in official website. Oh my f**king god... I need to setup webpack, typescript linter, typings, polyfills etc angular2-cli is no better, crawling with errors... why... why can't one just start a project and work instead spending loads of timing configuring all of that... AND WHY WE CANT HAVE PROPER SUPPORT FOR LATEST FEATURES...

I don't even know what I am ranting about... I just wish to spend more time creating things than configuring for ages development environment.

I got some work on a new project so I ran the 500, or so, unit tests and it took almost 3 minutes. Everything was mocked and no external dependencies so I got curious as to how on earth they could take so long.

I found some suspicious code doing a while loop over a date range incrementing by 1 day each time. It turned out the tests didn't initialise the start date which defaults to 01/01/0001, and there are 5 scenarios!

I got test execution down to a respectful 10s.

At a certain client, was asked to help them with an "intermediary" solution to stopgap a license renewal on their HR recruiting system.

This is something I was very familiar with, so no big. Did some requirements gathering, told them we could knock it out in 6 weeks.

We start the project, no problems, everything is fine until about 2.5 weeks in. At this point, someone demands that we engage with the testing team early. It grates a little as this client had the typical Indian outsourcing mega-corp pointey-clickey shit show "testing" (automation? Did you mean '10 additional testers?') you get at companies who put business people in charge of technology, but I couldn't really argue with it.

So we're progressing along and the project manager decides now is a great time to bugger the fuck off to India for 3 months, so she's totally gone. This is the point it goes off the rails. Without a PM to control the scope, the "lead tester," we'll call her Shrilldesi, proceeds to sit in a room and start trying to control the design of the system. Rather than testing anything in the specification, she just looked at the existing full HRIS recruiting system they were using and starts submitting bugs for missing features. The fuckwit serfs they'd assigned from HR to oversee this process just allowed it to happen totally losing focus on the fact this was an interim solution to hold them over for 6 months and avoid a contract renewal.

I get real passive aggressive at this point and refuse to deliver anything outside the original scope. We negotiate and end up with about 150% scope bloat and a now untenable timeline that we delivered about 2 weeks late, but in the end that absolute whore made my life a living hell for the duration of the project. She then got the recognition at the project release for her "excellent work," no mention of the people who actually did the work.

Tl;Dr people suck and if you value your sanity, you'll avoid companies that say things like, "we're not in the technology business" as an excuse to have shitty, ignorant staff.

How to profesionally say: you fucking illiterate and incompetent piece of shit, I am tired of spoonfeeding you because you dont use your fucking brain. I am fucking tired of explaining same concept over and over again for the past 2-3 months. Open fucking google for once and lookup latest practices, and learn what functional programming is and learn how to use operators instead of fucking inventing wheel again and again with your 100 lines boilerplate of code functions. Open your fucking mind for once and lookup stuff for yourself, instead of asking me to explain everything for the 100th time you lazy fuck. Oh and stop asking me "to be nice", this is gaslightling. I am being professional and I am the only person in this company who actually tolerates u on some level, others are just avoiding you you useless piece of shit. If I need to explain something for 5th time and I make you feel bad, it means you should feel bad. So maybe grow some balls and start putting in some effort, instead of playing the victim when you are the supposed 6 year senior and I am the 3 year junior, who has to do your fucking job half of the time. You are incapable of even using the standard architecture, what you use is fucking 6-7 years old. Fucking code monkey with broken english who doesnt understand what hes doing. You dont like my methods? I dare you to schedule an appointment between me and manager or your useless techlead, but I know you wont do that because I know you are afraid of everyone finding out how incompetent you are. You low fruit hanging task licking incompetent shit.

The fact that this week's rant topic exists is the exact reason I never do freelance work. It always ends in horror.

I don't believe good fullstack devs exist. A good junior will assess their talents/passions and specialize to become a senior. They'll keep checking the rest of the market from the corners of their eyes and start moving when necessary. But eventually, focus and specialization is a must.

If that's true for the field of development... why would I invest time in marketing, support, sales, PR, legal?

Maybe you can earn a bit more gross income in freelance work — but I see my employer as a service provider, I "hire" them so I don't have to manage phone calls, lose sleep over court cases, play product owner or worry about getting paid.

Most toxic work culture ?? oh boy where do I start.

Getting verbally abused and physical threats over bugs found in production.

All kinds of office politics going around where everyone openly admitted not liking others in other departments.

Your day's salary gets taken away if u are late by even 1 min. And no overtime pay and no you cannot say no to that either or end up getting laid off.

Company brags about giving their employees their salary on time.

Only the devs who have lasted more than 10 years in the company will be heard.

After so many job switches I managed to find one where I get to WFH and pretty much face no toxicity from others.

Put away the keyboard. Think about what you're going to do, chart it out, work through the logic and then, when the entire construct is before you, you start typing.

Yes it will take longer, you're a junior, enjoy that nobody expects you to do miracles (yet) and take the time, you'll get it back when you're so used to working through logical problems that it happens on its own as soon as you hear about the problem.

Cutting corners and "hacking a quick solution" without fucking over the entire system is an art form. Before you do art learn your damn craft.

Something I can never understand with my boss. This really makes me concerned with the future of the company imo.

I was given a project contract with all of the specifications and how many hours I had to each assignment.

I did my work and I kept myself within the time limit.

Today my boss and I had a status meeting about the project. In which he had an addition to one of my features which would basically require us to start over with it. He started to blame not only me but also my coworker on why we didnt predict that HE would want this addition to the feature. We got into a heated discussion over him putting that blame on us. My point I stuck to, was that the responsibility of specifications lies in the person who briefs a worker, not the worker who is supposed to play guessing game of what the briefer want. He vehemently denied that is how things work.

He basically shushed me and said that is how the order of things go.

Am I in the wrong here?

I have this teacher who focuses so much on documentation that I hardly get to code sometimes. The worst experience with that teacher was with a project I think about two years ago. Every time I came up with (modified) documentation (we have to document EVERYTHING before allowed to start programming) she would turn me away with some bs argumentation and also point out non existing English grammar errors (my English is way better than hers). After nine weeks of documenting (so, no single line of code yet and projects take ten weeks) she gave me the green light. Then at 'delivery' she had the fucking balls to to tell me that MY CODE WASN'T THAT STABLE AND GOOD YET.

I WAS LITERALLY HAVING A LIVE RAGE ATTACK OVER THERE.

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

Over the past few years I've tried to start learning JavaScript, only to become annoyed and move on. In my latest effort, I finally hit that "aha!" milestone. Turns out that the tutorial books and videos everybody said we're the ideal way to learn weren't so ideal for me. What ended up working:

1. Find a project tutorial.
2. Understand maybe 5% of what I'm doing.
3. Alter the project, ultimately breaking it.
4. Spend the few hours Googling.
5. Scrap it.
6. Redo it, exactly the same. It works this time.
7. Bask in my glory. For I am a JavaScript master.

I'll get there eventually. I think.

Sent another developer instructions for generating an SSH key pair and to send me the public key. He did so. There was a problem getting it to work. So, naturally, he emailed me the private key.

I got my first programming job half a year ago, the lead developer there is really fucked up... he is old fashioned and stubborn as hell. He developed a platform that is a mess, his comment: “it works”... but now I have to fix it... I argued with my boss and convinced him to put more time in making it more scalable and feature proof. But the lead developer back then... he didn’t agree it seems like he want to do everything as quickly as possible... now half a year later he stopped working for us and I’m the lead developer now.

And I’m discovering more and more bad decisions... HOWWWW

WHAT DID THIS GUY DO???

At one time I was arguing with him and he backfired a comment: “I’m doing it like this for 10 years”... so I guess that’s the problem... he didn’t put effort in keeping up with the latest developments...

There is literally no structure in his work, every file is different... HOW DO I FIX THIS IN A NICE WAY??? I’m thinking to just start over again...

First day on my first job ever, the boss asks me what I want to do. I indicated that I had some experience with php and the yii framework (which was at some point very cool xD), so I wanted to start with something like that. And so it goes: after two days of watching laracasts (which is an awesome platform by the way! :O) I got assigned to a project.

Now the company I work at uses some kind of self built system that tracks how many hours are spent on which project, and compares that to how many hours was estimated implementing a feature would take. That's cool, but then I saw that for the project I was working on the time estimated was 5 work days. This was the estimate for both designing the interfaces and implementing both front and backend. I knew in advance that this was probably way to little time for me, but didn't want to come over as the new kid who can't do shit x)

Anyway, I started on the project and was having fun, but the biggest time consuming aspect of the project was not necessarily that I didn't have enough experience: it was that the developer who started this project and made most of the design choices had written some very messy code, without tests or apparently any refactoring. Also, everything was extremly inconsistent and not according to all the best practices I just watched in my laracasts spree.

So fastforward a little: we're way over the estimated hours. Yay. Now suddenly the boss comes by with an almost angry face that the client is becoming angry and we need to finish soon. He makes it entirely our (me and the front end guy) problem and I just decide to say nothing and try to work faster.

Now I'm stuck writing fugly code on top of more fugly code and when I mentioned to my front end guy that I was almost finished with feature but I only needed to finish up the tests, he said something like "oh just don't write tests, that'll take too long"... Is that really the mindset of this company?! No wonder the project I work on was in a very bad state.

Thanks to devrant I see now that I just need to say something if I know that I won't be able to complete something in a certain amount of time and that other people are just like me (thank god). :) I think I'll need to post more rants to vent my frustrations x)

I'm old and dumb comparing how things are today with where I started from. Time to start over again.

My company just did its first delivery to a new big customer , got the acceptance docs signed etc.

Was pretty funny to see management and the business-tards furiously emailing one another with company wide replyAll
Congratulating one another over an excellent job they had done in particular,

for example :
Gavin : Ahh capital , well done john for your undertaking in this tremendous accomplishment

John: oh and thank YOU for your guidance Gavin, couldnt have done it without you, we really exceeded outselves with the hard work we put it, also a big mention to (insert another inbred manager's name)

And that keeps on bouncing on and on

( absolutely no fucking mention of devs who did the actual Work, nooo nooo just a brief reference to us as "the boys in london"....)

Kinda glad they aren't in office most of the time else this level of back-patting would have probably turned into a circle jerk in the board room.

Almost thought of getting the dev teams to join the storm of emails and start randomly congratulating one another too with company wide replyAlls but that kind of prank would likely be ill received by out high and mighty leaders.

( on the flip side maybe they would actually learn out names)

SeniorDev: “OMFG..MalwareBytes is taking up almost 50% of my CPU!”
Me: “Didn’t you have a virus on your machine couple of days ago?”
SeniorDev: “Uh..yea..but it was cleaned up.”
Me: “Your OS might have been compromised. If your antivirus is still busy doing something, then it may be time to start over with a fresh re-install.”
SeniorDev: “No, that’s not it. This is just BS our Network admins don’t want to fix because I’m not a VP”
Me: “I’m pretty sure they don’t care.”
-in as much of a ‘I’m kidding’ tone as I could -
Me: “They would care more if you stopped going to inappropriate web sites on the company computer.”
SeniorDev: “I never go to those sites. It was a link to a charity web site my wife sent me. You know how those sites are. They are built by college kids, so they have no security and was hijacked. That’s how I got the virus.”
Me: “You actually said that to Jim and he believed it?”
SeniorDev: “Well ...yea because….oh …–bleep- you.”
"Jim" sits about 50 feet away, popped his head over the cube wall and smiled. It was awesome.

Managed to make myself look like a fucking moron again today...

Can't mount NFS share, get "permission denied". Huh, that's weird... It's correctly exported.

Well it's correctly exported and rpcinfo -p $HOST times out... Must be firewall rule.

Firewall rule is changed but still no joy "permission denied"... Fuck sake networks, can't you do anything right first time?!!!

Firewall rule is correct I am reliably informed... Go about proving that it's not fucking correct and provide "evidence" to show this, I was a little bit more blunt than was strictly required.

Networks say they will take another look.

I turn NFS logging to verbose for my own interest and notice the line "path/to/directory is not a valid directory".

I, as a moron, had missed a "/" at the start of the path. That's why I still couldn't mount after the firewall change.

Go over and apologise in person and explain how I'm a total idiot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.

This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.

First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.

I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.

A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.

So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.

At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.

Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...

So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.

Never a single word from the community about me.

Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).

I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.

!Rant

Story, only read this if you feel like wasting your time

Ok so I live in a small village and it takes around 15 minutes to get to the next city by car. I can't drive yet because I am 15 and so I would need my parents to drive me there. There are also no buses anymore which drive to the city after 2pm.

Most of my friends live in that city, none of them code. We always meet on a discord server and then play games or do some other shit. Today I got online at around 3pm and when I joined the discord server they asked me if I wanted to go see the movie 'IT' with them tonight, I said yeah of course (I am a huge fan of horror movies), but only if my parents come home early enough to drive me there.
Time passed and then my last friend left the discord server because he had to walk to the cinema.
I was the last one still on the server and also the one with the farest way to the cinema. I already knew that my parents wouldn't come home in time anymore and so I decided to just start coding something. I usually code while listening to some music and so I switched over to spotify to choose a playlist. I just randomly clicked on the first playlist spotify recommended me and the song started playing: 'Sound of silence'.

Fuck you spotify algorithm.

I know that not being able to go to the cinema with your friends is a fucking stupid reason to be sad but I just feel very sad right now. Sitting alone in my dark room staring at my computer screen.

Sorry for wasting your time

WHAT THE FUCK.
I have to deal with a fucking bug that crashes my app only when I'm NOT looking for it.
I investigate another bug? Then BAM, here it is and crashes the app. And I have to start over again find the right conditions to not trigger it again.
I investigate that bug? Nope, everything runs as smooth as velvet.

It's like a Heisenbug, but the cat is dead in the box AND pissing all over the lab at the same time.

My company hired a new person on my team. He was scheduled to start on a Monday but pushed back a week at the last minute. The rumor around the office was that his flight home that weekend was canceled, but he didn’t notify our boss of it until minutes before he was expected in.

Next Monday he didn’t come in, and no one could get in touch with him. We eventually discovered that he was in jail. He claimed he was pulled over on the way to work for a traffic violation, then found out he had an outstanding warrant from a traffic ticket mix-up over ten years ago. Unsurprisingly, when he did make it in later that week, he was immediately fired.

I’m wondering how reasonable it was to fire him. A responsible, organized friend of mine also got in trouble from a traffic ticket she was never notified of, so I know his story isn’t impossible and doesn’t mean he’s a bad person. On the other hand, missing your start day because you’re in jail is never a good look — doubly so after he pushed back his start date the first time. My company has a very open culture so I would have some room to encourage us not to put inappropriate weight on what is often a very flawed legal system.

Worst codding interruptions? That's easy: fucking meetings.

You know they're coming up. They start to drain your focus. You double check the clock/start time. You ask yourself if you were supposed to prepare anything. You typically waste an hour of your time over something that could have been a fucking e-mail (or doesn't even matter at all). You come back to your desk, and your focus is broken and you wonder when the next meeting is coming up.

Inmates are trying to take over the asylum again.

Got a message from the web team manager deeply concerned because since switching to the new logging framework, the site is significantly slower.

She provided no proof or any data to what 'significantly slower' means.

#1 The 'new logging' has been in place and logging for 5 years. We only recently depreciated the ILogger interface ('new' ILogger interface only has 1 method instead of 5)
#2 The 'old logging' was modified 5 years ago, so even if you were using the 'old' interface, the underlying implementation is still the same.

She tried to push the 'it wasn't this slow before' argument, so I decided to do some fact based analysis.
Knowing they deployed their logging changes couple of weeks ago, I opened up AppDynamics, looked at the average call time to Splunk (along with a few other http calls they are doing)
- caching services - 5ms
- splunk - 30ms
- Order Service - 350ms
- Product Data Service -525ms

Then I look at the data they are logging, for the month of June, over 5 million messages. At 30ms each, that's almost 42 hours spent logging errors...yes errors. Null reference exceptions, Argument exceptions, easily fixable stuff.

So far for the month of July (using the 'new' logging), almost 2.5 million errors. Pretty close so far with June's numbers.

My only suggestion was to fix the bugs in their code so they don't log so many errors.

Her response.."Can we have one of our developers review your logging code? We believe we can find ways to optimize the http requests"

Oh good Lord. I'm not a drinking man..but ...I might start.

To anyone asking for tips and tricks to start programming or become good at it, here is your ultimate golden advice: learn how to google and stop asking stupid questions like this before doing a quick research.

Reasons why:

1. You will most likely to learn better if you do your own research before asking for help. Even if you can't solve problem, you will be better and better at googling over time.
2. It is instant source of information. No need to wait for response (except response from server of course).
3. It takes only YOUR time.
4. Much more possible solutions/answers to your problems/questions.
5. Your quality of life will be improved over time. Not only your dev life but your daily life too.

Honestly, nothing kills your brain cells faster than doing the same repetitive tasks at work, day in and day out. It’s like I'm just on autopilot—pushing buttons, running scripts, rinse, repeat. At some point, I start wondering if I’m a dev or just a glorified robot.

And to keep my sanity intact? Competitive programming. Yeah, that’s how I free my mind—throwing myself into algorithmic problems during my break time, just to remind myself that there’s more to life than the mundane loop of tasks at work. I’ll take an NP-hard problem over this any day. At least that makes me think.

I lost one of my idols, there are few people I have that much respect for. I literally can not think of anyone else infact.

Ive just been taking a second.🙁 I mean you live your life thinking there's time or that you can wait to do things , like I'll just do that one thing a little later. But it's not true. The reality is there's so little time.

There are few truly great people. It's going to take me a little while to get over it properly.

But when I do I hope I don't switch back into old patterns.

I want to be just like him, his work was amazing. He worked all the time not because of fame or money but because he just wanted to make cool shit for people to enjoy. Because he enjoyed it himself and he liked seeing people amazed and happy due to his work.

The best people are the types of people who bring a smile to your face by just being who they are.

It was enough to know he was out there doing his thing being that incredible, it never occured to me he could just be gone. The world needs more people like him especially now with everything so fucked up. He died far to young. 33 isn't old it's not even middle aged

All I want is to be like him, I hope I will be one day 😞 and I'm going to start trying right now.

And I will try harder.

On negotiation and signing contract
================================
manager: yes you will work 8 hours a day from Tatta hours to Tat tat ta hours.
dev: okay great, i accept it. So no overtime and everythings right?
manager: that we will consider.
dev: hmm okay
=========================

Start working for about 1 month
=========================
manager: John, you not showing up at the office today? What happened?
dev: Sir, I have to stay up all night finished the last task as required and just sleep around 6am in the morning.
manager: John, i need to tell you. your performance is very great. Our clients are happy.
You deliver all the task. We love you, John.
dev: Yes thank you so much. I am happy too, but i need to sleep now i been over time for the last 3 weeks.
Manager: don't worry john, you will get reward later.
===================================
Weeks later:
dev: i need to request for leave, i am over work and now i am sick, my eye got red and cannot look at the screen.
manager: what is happening this month, you been late to work and you not deliver the task, you are sick and this and that, and depressed and whatever... tata taata,
dev: sir, when i first started you said i could only have to work 8 hours a day, now I work more than 12 hours day. What's change?
================================
life as devs in tough companies, high expectation and shit.

My company has two offices in separate cities but they treat each the devs of each location very very differently.

In one office the devs get full power to experiment with whatever tech they want, they just stomp their feet and management gives em whatever they ask for, freedom of choice regarding anything they are working on, to be allowed to do greenfield work or experimental stuff

But in my office we are forced to do ONLY. Bug fixing and refactoring shitty code from over a decade a go, our tech is ancient and we are not allowed to to
Shit , anything we ask for is denied
And improvements to our process is shut down with the reasoning that whatever we got works so why meddle ??

For us , management is solely focussed on making sure we respond to support calls , deployments , configurations and little bug fixing. Basically they only care that we manage to finish for out next delivery.
No new work whatsoever!
If there is any hint of something new to to
Implemented the golden boys from the other office just stopm their feet tillmthey get it or just go off and start working on it then seek permission afterwards, with their much larger team they obviously get further than we do by the time management hears about it so they end up taking over the work since they already have more done already

My manager decided to push us to attend a company devCon to share ideas with our devs from our other location. This rapidly turned into a sour experience

Basically we do all shitty boring work which puts money on the table which goes straight to those idiots to play with...

They have the guts to laugh when we mentioned that we never get anything interesting to work on

Never seen so many of our devs looking up job sites on the bus back...
This is gonna blow up in management's face...

I came first in a 48 hour 4x person gamejam with a game idea in 6 hours with 3x people.

Some info: I had an idea as soon as the topic went live, told the team this is the idea (button masher), we are going to do it in unity (at the time I was working at a studio that used UE4.x), and I'll also make a custom controller using an old keyboard to make it more fun. Ended up coming first place and won a nice bottle of champagne each, and at no point did we over stretch. Nice clean project with a good night's sleep in-between. The team was me (dev), an artist and a technical designer.

That was my first start to finish use of unity and C#, and now I exclusively use unity and make games for Xbox One and Steam.

The guy who became my manager just pushes to the prod branch.

On a repo where another team clearly set up development and production branches.

This guy has been pushing code like crazy and I always wanted to take my time setting things up properly in our team: TDD, CI/CD, etc.

Because he pushed so much he became my manager and I was seen as unproductive.

Data Science and software development best practices just dont coexist it seems.

Yeah yeah, it's up to me to start introducing good practices, but atm "getting it done" takes priority over the real based shit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can't even deal with this. We just deployed a new update to our system, and everything was going smoothly. And then, out of nowhere, we started getting a bunch of error messages and user complaints.

Why do these things always happen? We spent hours trying to figure out the source of the problem, and it turns out it was because we didn't do enough testing before the deployment. Are you kidding me?

I know that testing can be time-consuming, but seriously, this is ridiculous. It's frustrating when something like this happens, especially when we're under a tight deadline. And to make matters worse, we had to roll back the deployment and start all over again. I just want to throw my computer out the window.

Uuuugghhh!

Hi
I'm an active user here so I know most of you.

I created a throwaway because I consider this a sensitive subject to me, and don't want people here to think I'm crazy.

I have some form of ocd but I don't know exactly which subtype it is.

It's not really something that makes my life impossible, but it makes me feel awful from time to time.

the way it works is that I imagine accidents happening to me or people I love, and I get triggered more if they are potentially caused by a mistake from me and they feel very vivid in my mind.

It's awful and terrifying.

Being close to anything that could cause harm is a trigger:
heights without any type of fall protection, knives, elevators, escalators, being on a plane

Being close to/in said objects/situations can start a clip in my mind as if I was watching a final destination movie.

This is a stronger obsession if it happens because of my fault, like tripping with my kid in my arms, or fumbling a knife while I cook.

Sometimes I react by curling and doing a painful expression and twitching a bit, even in public.

it's terribly painful.

i look like a crazy person, although considering what I'm writing, i probably am. It's just that I feel very scared of strangers in public noticing what I'm doing and finding out I'm crazy.

sometimes I get scared of the possibility of me being an actual psycho like the ones you see on crime shows.

as far as i know i think im normal in terms of compassion, empathy to others and never had any interest in harming others.

it's just part of the ocd, being hypervigilant of me, obsessing over me causing harm either accidentally or deliberately.

I'm also very scared of puking in public, or even worse, in front of friends.

Specially true if you're eating but you're seated in a spot where there's no way out except if everybody gets up.

I start by becoming self conscious of the possibility of puking, and sometimes I twitch a bit too, while trying to not look too crazy and joping that the next bite doesn't cause me to projectile vomit over people.

I hate this shit.

Here's what being in a rut is like:

You wake up to the alarm, you waste an hour or two in bed stalling browsing social shit. Finally got out of bed. You have a todo list. You ignore it. Get something to eat. Open Netflix or some brain numbing shit while having breakfast. A few hours go by, you're still watching Netflix and switching to browsing social shit in-between so your brain is numb as much as possible. It's lunch time, you're supposed to cook something, nah, I will order something. Oh, it's bedtime, let's make a todo list and go to bed and start over tomorrow...

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.

Spent a lot of time designing a proper HTTP (dare I even say RESTful) API for our - what is until now a closed system, using a little-known/badly-supported message-over-websocket protocol to do RPC-style communications - supposedly enterprise-grade product.

I make the API spec go through several rounds of review with the rest of the dev team and customers/partners alike. After a few iterations, everybody agrees that the spec will meet the necessary requirements.

I start implementing according to spec. Because this is the first time we're actually building proper HTTP handling into the product, but we of course have to make it work at least somewhat with the RPC-style codebase, it's mostly foundational work. But still, I manage to get some initial endpoints fully implemented and working as per the spec we agreed. The first PR is created, reviews are positive, the direction is clear and what's there already works.

At this point in time, I leave on my honeymoon for two weeks. Naturally, I assume that the remaining endpoints will be completed following the outlines/example of the endpoints which I built. When I come back, the team mentions that the implementation is completed and I believe all is well.

The feature is deployed selectively to some alpha customers to start validation testing before the big rollout. It's been like that for a good month, until a few days ago when I get a question related to a PoC integration which they can't seem to get to work.

I start investigating and notice that the API hasn't been implemented according to the previously agreed upon spec at all. Not only did the team manage to implement the missing functionality in strange and some even broken ways, they also managed to refactor my previously working endpoints into being non-compliant.

Now, I'm a flexible guy. It's not because something isn't done exactly as I've imagined it that it's automatically bad. However, I know from experience that designing a good/clear/future-proof API is a tricky exercise. I've put a lot of time and effort into deliberate design decisions that made up the spec that we all reviewed repeatedly and agreed upon. The current implementation might also be fine, but I now have to go over each endpoint again and reason about whether the implementation still fulfills the requirements (both soft and hard) that we set out to meet.

I'm met with resistance, pushback and disbelief from product management and dev co-workers alike when I raise the concern that the API might actually not be production-ready (while I'm frantically rewriting my integration tests and figuring out how the actual implementation works in comparison to what was spec'ed).

Oh, and did I mention that product management wants to release this by end-of-week?!

A 12-week coding Bootcamp won't turn you into a full stack web developer.

It's like a diet it takes time, it's not over in a few weeks even if you start intensive and really commit to it.

So someone here had the job to merge the current version of our software into another older repo.
(That older repo has some features for future versions, that should be only in there ... don´t ask ... not my decision)

Took him long enough. But he forgot to check one thing while merging: The encoding of the files.

And we´re german...

ALL umlauts, and all other special chars in the code were replaced with this: �
No global replace, because all chars were replaced with the same char.
(Why the fuck do we have special chars in the code in the first place???)

So to not need him to start all over again I compiled a list of common german words containing umlauts and did a global search and replace.

I think I got 90% of the errors like that.
Now he´s going to correct the rest of the errors.

Fuck the comments in the code though.
Just a waste of time...

"For me, it means..."

For me it was not one specific meeting, but rather a series of meetings with a customer over some years.

It was like the movie "groundhog day", it was the same all over again.

We had this technical term, and our customer had his own definition of what it meant and what it's supposed to be. No need to say that his definition did not match the one the engineers and developers of the world had agreed on.

At least a dozen times, i convinced him, but as soon as the meeting ends, it's all reset and we start at zero next time with his new or old definition of what a definition should mean. Sometimes i was just sick and tired of it so i let him explain how it is while i just stared into the void. Didn't matter he told me once, it will happen again next time again, like it never happened before.

So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.

Why the fuck people advertise themselves as 24h service if they work 9..17?! I need a fucking plumber to change leaky toilet seat. Called over ten different guys, and, guess what? They don't give a shit!

Meanwhile I used to have clients calling in the middle of the night or early in the morning. And I DON'T work 24/7.

What's fucking wrong with this world where you have to study long years and buy pricey tools and be available to the client all the time, and on the other hand you don't have to even start a college, just have right tools and materials, and you have better job? I could become a plumber. At least my work wouldn't be outsourced to India...

Sorry you Indian guys ;-)

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

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

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

So much for that fuckery.

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

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

Okay, vent over.
Sorry for that.

Dual Boot Linux & Windows.

I hardly ever see anyone do it right. And there is just two tricks that make a completely new experience out of it. I am not sharing it with you to be nice, I am sharing because I am curious if you're already doing it.

1. Install on a second hard drive, not a different partition. Learn which button to hold on the boot screen to select the boot drive. You can still chain-load via Grub, but the major advantage, updates of neither OS will fuck up your boot loader. You can update it abso-fucking-lutely risk free. Second advantage, advice 2. becomes trivially easy.

2. Set up a virtual machine. Select as its hard drive the raw disk volume where you have installed your Windows. You can do this with VirtualBox, but QEMU with virtual machine manager make is far easier to set this up in. You can now start Windows under Linux as a virtual machine. You can always start a small application, but the big deal is installing. Start a Steam download, have it installed and ready without switching over. Running windows updates. And when you then have time to play the game, just reboot and you have it already installed.

I feel like many are not aware that you can start a virtual machine of a real hard drive. It's one of those things that improve usability of it enormously. It's something where many will just not think about it because they keep dual booting and virtual machines in two different categories in their brains, but immediately will think it is obvious as soon as they hear about it.

So, who already did this? Raise your hands!

Question time:

Has anyone used PHP unit with Selenium before?

I have a.. well words can’t explain it nice enough but, beyond a joke, not even funny, spaghetti code base I’ve come to inherit recently, which god help me, doesn’t follow any design patterns at all, it’s just a stamp this here, staple this down over here and throw paint at the wall and hope it sticks.

It’s a mixture of procedural and functional with the rare class kind of mess.

So attempting to refactor by any means is not a real possibility without some kind of behavioural testing in place first otherwise I know I’m going to end up breaking something somewhere and not even know it.

Also if anyone has had the privilege of such code bases, tips to dealing with the mess are appreciated.

Oh and no, I can’t rm -rf or start again.😭

Damn simulation.

Some juniors grabbed keyboard and reprogrammed main species to stay at home and fear of death while I was busy working with other features.

Moreover someone made additional changes from infected computer and guess what....

Unfortunately it’s real time system with increasing entropy and we can’t revert changes so fixing damn shit would take from one to two decades.

We don’t have backups cause last time we used them we also killed dinosaurs.

It would be just easier to erase everything and start from beginning cause our statistics charts are fucked up - again but motherfucker boss don’t want to do it.
He’d rather teleport again to adjust the world. Damn fucker thinks he’s god but in fact he’s just prick with rich parents.

I’ve decided to piss him off by adjusting planet thermostat so we can start over.
2 years more and changes would be irreversible.

Damn job.

Soooo it's Monday........ 🤯

@C0D4 started the day fixing current projects defects (4 tickets smashed before coffee 💪)

Then after coffee, run a test coverage report and see a significant decline over the past few months, so spends a couple hours adding more tests to get some areas filled in - meh, nothing like 50+ lines per test... to test a if() statement but whatever - complex scenarios will be complex to get too, but no my tests break and I'm missing data I didn't know about🤦‍♂️
So let's comment all that out, and go to lunch ... mmmm lunch.

Get back, start working on those again, and then get handed a new issue, so comment that all back out again, ( ok I know what you're thinking, but I'm working in an environment that does not use git for deployments - don't ask, real pain in the ass I haven't had time to invest into yet - but as code versioning only) anywho, starts to workout this new issue but don't figure it out, enter a 30 minute meeting.................. yea that was 2 hours later but was a very practical whiteboard session only to work out I have something like 16-20 weeks of work over 4-5 projects to get out in like 6 weeks... hahahahahahaha fml..... oh and that's excluding another project which had a 6 weeks of work in the pipeline to get to somehow.... I'm not seeing this one happening, and probably conflicting projects needed on top of that down the track... but we'll leave those out for now!

Whoot is fucking home time!!!

🤷‍♂️I'm starting to think I'm like a team of 5-10 devs right now, maybe I should start asking for 5-10x more 😏

#letsBringOnTuesday!!!!

The first program that was used at a company.

I wrote it on suggestion of my father to help with simplifying calculations for rental machines at his work and once finished it reduced time from start to finished report from 2-3 days down to 30 minutes, and corrections could be done in minutes instead of starting all over.

It also featured saving and loading old reports.

And for context, this was 1987 and excel did not exist and existing spreadsheets was not nearly as easy to use.

Top gripes about getting older as I'm about to turn 40:

5. Actually starting to have moments at home after work where I'm contemplating saying 'Hey babe, wanna bang?' but before I can get the words out my body pipes in with 'Dude, cool your jets, we're wiped out today; check back tomorrow.' Women say they like older guys because <insert character trait here> but I'm now convinced it's just because they know there's less work involved. =/

4. Friends with young children. I hardly ever see them anymore, and when I do, all they talk about are their kids and their shitty relationship with their co-parent. The circle continues to get smaller...

3. Having to go get glasses in order to renew my driver's license. How do we not have a heads-up display in every vehicle by now that shows the street numbers of buildings as I'm perpendicular to them as well as the names of upcoming cross streets? That way I'd fix the problem the way I do for everything else: notch up the font scaling on my display a point or two. Elon, you're slipping...

2. Realizing that the "American Dream" isn't worth the paper it was printed on. (Anyone else remember paying 97¢ for a gallon of gas or $2 for a pack of Marlboros?) Concurrent realization: It's not easy to find work in another country without moving there first, even if you speak the language. Any devs in Portugal that read this, ligue-me.

1. Being too busy to just chat with new people I meet except on rare occasion. Mostly referring to work time here, when it seems I'm always needing to find the shortest route to the objectif du jour. If I could tell my teenage self just one piece of advice, it'd probably be "start your career in Europe, not the USA" but I really want it to be "treasure the time you spend on IRC talking about anything and everything with people that always have time for you and vice versa, because it's going to be over before you know it."

With over 10 years as a dev under my belt I never wanted to change company before my probation is even over. I never felt so drained, and pissed off for the entire duration of my working hours, every day for about 4 months straight. I was thinking it should get better, I listened to all the rubbish webinars about the company culture, how inclusive and diverse we are and how they value phycological safety and how everyone should feel safe to speak their mind. The people are fucking reviewing my approved and merged PRs and expecting me to address their comments. Like someone goes on holiday and when they’re back they want to spray wisdom around, and that seems to happen to everyone not just me. When we have technical discussions and I express my opinion I get given out to for speaking too much. Like what the actual fuck, your code is shit, everyone knows it and complains about it, but we should look at what we already have as an example. How the fuck you think you can improve your code if your not going to change your shit. Writing class diagrams for about two weeks at start of each project and nitpicking every fucking thing, only to abandon it after our first sprint as the fucking requirements have changed and what we agreed at the beginning as no longer relevant. No shit as if they don’t know requirements change ALL THE FUCKING TIME AND THIS IS EXPECTED. I was also asked to send a slack message every morning when I start working, when I get my lunch, when I am back from lunch and when I finish work. Have to fill in some stupid weekly update system with what tickets I’ve worked on during the week, like have you heard of Jira filetrs ? Stop asking me how I am getting on if I’m fucking closing all my tickets every sprint. I don’t ask you questions, if I finish all the work you asked me to on time, you can safely assume I am doing fine. Also your fucking back to back meetings are not helping me close my tickets any faster. Already got an offer from another company I am out of fucking here.

YOU CAN ALL STICK YOUR PR COMMENTS, ENDLESS MEETINGS AND WHAT NOT UP YOUR FUCKING ARSES. 🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻

On my project the customer has re-signed into a contract several times when they have budget to continue work. The first time they got us to build the system was a huge success story because the team was assembled quickly and we did rapid development. Initialize repo to prod in 1.5 months. The customer asked for the same dev team. Strong dev team, a PM that doesn't take shit, and pure agile. Lets call her don't-take-shit PM.

When the customer re-signed the executive decided that she didn't like don't-take-shit PM. So the project manager gets replaced by play-by-the-rules PM who will comply with stupid requests and micromanagement. He isn't a bad PM but he tries to make everyone happy. The amount of management types executive installs on the project is massive, and development team is cut down in major ways. Customer and executive shit rolls down to the development team and we can't get anything done. The customer starts to lose faith because we can't get traction. They start demanding traditional waterfall/SDLC docs. Which causes more delay in the project.

So the executive decides that the PM can take a fall for it to save face for the company. She moves play-by-the-rules PM to another project. He starts handover to a new PM that has a history of being her pushover. The customer hadn't seen him yet so now we have push-over PM.

Play-by-the-rules PM is finally out of the project and instead of moving to a different account the company decides to "lay him off because there is no work". So basically they made him take the fall for the failure while promising reassignment, and instead let him go. This is so unfair..

Meeting with push-over PM yesterday and he shows us his plan. Identical to play-by-the-rules PM's plan that got him axed.We point that out and show him the docs that were made for it. His face clearly communicates "OH SHIT WHAT DID I SIGN UP FOR?"

This is PART 1/2 of a series of rants over the course of a software engineering class years ago.

We were four team members, two had never failed a class, I’ll refer to them as MT and FT, male and female top students, respectively, and an older student with some real world experience who I’ll refer to as SR.

Rant 1: As I was familiar with the agile methodologies I became the Scrum Master and was set with the task of explaining it to the team members, SR showed up late and nobody seemed interested in learning new methodology. At this point I knew we'd have trouble as a team.

Rant 2: FT made up her project proposal without informing anybody, which required a real client/product owner. We only figured it out after her proposal was accepted as the project, so we ended up working with fake requirements.

Rant 3: This one is partly my fault. I researched first and then worked, which meant I was the last to turn up my work. In one activity MT pressures me and I agree to a deadline so everyone can send their work to the teacher in a timely manner. Since I was the last to finish, I was also asked to give the doc some formatting, which I did in a hurry so it wasn't the best.
The next day MT and FT start complaining about me, saying I took too long and that they expect me to do better next time or else. At the same time they were stressed and in a hurry because we had to explain the project outline in front of the class and they didn't study.
Turns out copying and pasting all your work in less than an hour means you don’t learn anything. FT actually asked me for help days before and I sent her a website in English, which she wasn't very good at, so she just ran it through Google Translate and called it a day.
Later FT called me rude for interrupting MT in the presentation, which I did because he started making up stuff about the project.

Rant 4: SR expressed his dislike for school through profanity in variable names and commit messages. This caused MT and FT to dislike him. I thought it was immature but if anything it should’ve been reported to the teacher and move on.

Rant 5: I was stuck trying to get the REST API working for the project Admittedly this was my fault, too, because I was pushing for the usage of things nobody was familiar with for the sake of learning. This coupled with SR’s profanity led to drama and the progress was dropped, starting over from scratch.

At this point I stepped down from the Scrum Master role as nobody seemed to listen anymore.

If this isn't the worst thing.

I was asked to develop a WordPress plugin as an intern developer and I've been on it since last week. I got stuck when i finally had the loops running but couldn't find a way to format the output without overwriting the existing values on each iteration.

For the last one week I've been showing the progress on my code to the CTO and this is how it has been.

Me: Hello. Everything is coming along fine, I have most of the functions running properly, do you mind looking into the algorithm?

CTO: Oh not at all, let's see what you got. Omg great code for an intern. I think you should add a new variable there and maybe clean up that function over there because it's deprecated now and yeah HaHa, Great work.

Me: Thanks xD I'll have it finished latest next week.

CTO: Oh great. I can't wait to see what you'd have by next week so we can install it on our WordPress.

*Next finally week comes and I'm done with the code.

Me: Hello, I'm done with the entire code! Want to take a look? The plugin works just exactly as described.

*CTO takes a look

CTO: Omg?

Me: Omg?

CTO: This is completely bad programming practice, so you are running 4 nested loops that all send queries to our data base and make changes to data. This would have a very drastic effect on the server considering the traffic we get.

Me: But you saw this exact code last week and said it was okay, I only changed some CSS since the last time.

CTO: Omg, we can't accept this, you have to develop it again from the scratch without using those loops and queries.

Me: What? Okay, fine. Any hints?

CTO: Yes.

Me: What?

CTO: Just start. That's the greatest hint I could ever give. And also, always have a plan before you begin.

Me: Yeah, thanks for those. It's the first time I'm hearing them and they would totally be applicable to building this thing.

So, with couple of new people in senior managerial roles, pink slips started flying left and right before the holiday season. That didn't happen before in the company. It's still relatively small and when people left that was for better paid or more interesting work.

While I can understand that from the business perspective and especially for a few who might have been considered dead weight (devs and other roles), I have a serious problem with the way it was handled. It's one of those 5 minute notices. If we weren't remote, I guess escorting out by security would follow.

Most recent person to go is actually one of the most senior devs at the position that became redundant over time, as it clashed in the "pyramid" with another dev. He was involved in many aspects of the product and greatly contributed to the overall success during years of hard work, i'd say maybe more than any of us.

He didn't fuck up anything major as far as I know, his services were just not needed anymore, compared to the other guy. Saving money. I get that.

At T-1 day he prepared a demo of his project. Meetings, Slack, everything as usual. Next thing we got was a "we wish him well in future endeavours" e-mail.

What I find most disturbing is the fact his account was removed immediately, and then we were asked to get any files and anything else we might need, all over personal communication channels (private e-mail, Skype etc.) because he was locked out of all company accounts.

I seem to have have survived this year. One thing they have definitely achieved, based on some off the record chat and some public updates, tweets etc I can see, is for many of us to start networking, polishing CVs and generally stop giving many fucks about the company and the outcome.

I've myself started brushing up on some new skills (stacks) and some old ones (algorithms, etc.) I may need any day now, as it seems.

If they can basically tell "thank you and fuck off" to one person maybe most involved with the company growth, with zero dignity and respect for the person, then fuck them.

I am so sick and tired of hearing “AI” everywhere all the time. Yeah how about we integrate some AI into your super smart toaster so that it knows when to start preparing for when you put toasts in it in the morning.

Not even mentioning all these idiots being like “oh yeah AI is becoming sentient. Oh yeah AI is gonna take over the world”.

Brother the current state of AI is just machine learning, it’s a stupid pattern detector and generator it doesn’t have thoughts, emotions. Please just stop it.

So, a few words about this setup :
- I am not Portuguese, my girlfriend got this poster while on a trip
- The second monitor is very old and uses fluorescent tubes. It's shitty and not stylish, but useful at times
- Yes, I use a standalone scanner. Every multifunction printer I've had ended up suiciding itself, and suicided the built in scanner with it. A standalone scanner should be indestructible.
- The case is open because I haven't paid much attention to fans and stuff, so it gets pretty hot when gaming
- Talk about gaming : I dual boot W10/Ubuntu but use the original Gnome DE with Adwaita Dark (I love it). However, W10 is only useful for Lightroom and games. When Steam released proton, I decided to start using Darktable for photo editing in order to ditch Windows once and for all. That will probably happen in the coming months.
- I have not wired my home yet, so I use a router as Wi-Fi receiver.
- The top of the desk is not the original one. It used to be a glass one, but I didn't like the feel and it was too small. So I made a wooden one and painted it with paint my father had left over. However, it ended up looking hideous and sticks to the skin when resting on it for a long time. It has to be changed/fixed.
- The headphones hanger is just a big ass screw, and the headphones jack has been fixed at least a dozen times. I even changed the cable two times.
- The mic is shitty but cost only 8€ on eBay.

I thought noise cancelling headphones were a universal sign and courteous way of saying "I'm busy, fuck off" but apparently that doesn't seem to translate to my team. Every time I put these things on people start trying to talk over/through them.

How else do I let my team know to fuck off?

Please take sleep deprivation seriously!
Take care of it and don't allow stress to take you over.

Here's a little story of what happened to me:

I've had sleep problems for all of my life, but the beginning of last summer 2018 it went too far. I turned 18 and somehow all the school, dev and personal work started to pile up, I stressed about them and started to have no sleep every other day and little sleep another. Immediately I took time off from everything for trying get better sleep.

Having no sleep means that your brain starts to run in really low gear but you might not even notice it. So I started stressing about every little detail, making ridiculous decisions and doing stuff that didn't really make any sense.

I went to a doctor and was ordered to take time off for a month or so and start medication with bunch of different pills. At the time I thought the medication could wait for a day and went to an old work friend's place for night stay to discuss about everything. That wasn't obviously the thing I should've done. I was up all of that night, he slept, and in the morning he noticed something was really a bit off about me.

We went to the hospital and I agreed for a treatment in there. They got me to sleep normally again and I rested there for a while. I went back home or actually my parents' place and the problems continued, and back to the hospital I go. This time there was no choice. After a really long while, my mind started to stabilize enough that I was allowed to return to my everyday life: enjoying my summer break. It was an awful summer. I often felt lonely and bored. But at least I slept normally.

In the fall I returned to my usual busy schedule. And life's good again. This time I will manage my stress and sleep better and take them to account when planning schedule.

tldr:
first year in college we programmed 24 hrs straight to fix somebody's mess before the deadline. Decided not to screw him over, instead he claimed to have done everything and we failed the assignment.

Long version:
var group= new[]{"Mike", "Gavin", "Gus", "I", "Ben" };
var client = "Jack"';

First year of college we had an assignment to make a web program for somebody.
Ben wanted to join our group and he already knew a client so we let him join.

After joining Ben wanted to be project lead, but we already decided Mike based on his experience.
Ben claimed to be much better in every way than Mike at and kept coming with stuff the following weeks why we should make him project lead. He kept pointing out when Mike did something wrong and he even came with an audio file where he clearly made jack say that he wanted Ben to be project lead .
After that we were all a bit pissed and told him that he should get it in his head that he was not going to be project lead and just start working on his part of the assignment.

We also found out that Ben was a documentation addict, what we could write in a small paragraph, he wrote a whole page about it. No joke, I rewrote a page of his in 5-6 rows with the same information in it.
No problem you thing, wrong! Because of this he kept bothering us arguing and claiming that our documentation was wrong because it was to short.

In the week of the deadline we asked Ben if he was also done, and told us that he was done for a while now.

The day before the deadline we came to school thinking we only had to do some merging and finishing up documentation.
Then we found out that Ben has almost nothing, and what he had the IDE was screaming that it was incorrect, spaces in Id's and css class names for instance. A really good programmer, my ass!
We were so pissed off at this point, but we had 24 hrs and needed to come up with a plan to fix it.

We decided that Mike and I were going to fix Ben his shit in the coming 24 hrs and Ben was going to make our last bit of documentation because we would not have the time for that, Especially if we had to argue with him like we had to do for each bit of documentation. Gus did not have time and Gavin could not program on his own yet, he wanted to help, but helping him help us would cost more time than we had.

We all went home after that and Mike and I started to program 24 hours straight while in a Skype call, making what Ben had 2 months for. Shortly before the deadline Mike looked at our finishing up documentation received from Ben and told me it was "Okay" and zipped everything up and uploaded it to school with a few minutes to spare.

After that we thought everything was good, we made Ben's part work and delivered it in time. We also decided not to throw Ben under the bus, because this would hurt all our grades because we did not work good as a group since we should have noticed it earlier.

A few weeks go by till the assessment.
The assessment start with asking if we want individual grades or as a group when you all think you did equal amount. We choose as a group, because if we chose individual not only Ben but also Gavin would get a lower grade and we did not think that was fair because he tried so hard.

We demo the product and the teachers are positive. When the teachers start about the documentation, the first thing they tell is that they found something interesting in the documentation, and they read it to us:

"I, Ben, have made all the documentation because my group did not want to."

That was so far from the truth, we all did make our documentation about the parts we made. Yes he did do overall a little bit more because every single bit of documentation we had to argue with him, so every time he volunteers to make it, we would all agree. And he made Mike's and i's last bit of documentation.

Telling the teachers on that point would not have mattered, it would only have hurt is in another way, so we did not and all failed the assignment. And we all felt like to strangle him.
This is now a few years back, but i still want too.

About a year ago, I started a new position as a Full Stack Java Developer. When I started my employer got me a brand new, shiny, Asus laptop. As I prefer Linux (mint) to perform my magic I had to whipe Windows 10 and reinstall it. It turned out that my new shiny laptop was in fact so shiny that Linux (mint) didn't support/contain all the necessary drivers (yet), especially the network/bluetooth drivers and the gfx's drivers turned out a bit of a pain.. Over the year things slowly got better with every new kernel update that came in. However, due to me trying to fix things before those updates, Linux also had become somewhat unstable.

So ... last week I took some time to re-install that laptop and also take the opportunity to upgrade from Linux mint 18 to Linux mint 19 ... or so I thought ... Linux mint 19 was running (very) hot to the point where the laptop would shutdown due to the MOBO's thermal protection mechanims kicking in. ... Ok ...maybe Linux mint 19 was not such a good choice .... let's see if Ubuntu 18.04 is an option ... Nope ... Linux would lock up within a minute after booting up ... no mouse, no keyboard ... nothing. .... *sigh* ... let's (re)install Linux Mint 18.3 again ... and behold, I can start performing magic again.

Linux, it can be such a pain at times. I still prefer it, but running into all those 'weird' things on my laptop when reinstalling, I have to admit I have seriously considered 'just' installing windows 10 again and be done with it. Luckily I could also remind myself of what a pain Windows is to do serious docker/java development in comparison to Linux which gave me the strength to keep going ... :)

My company email:

- It's time for the monthly password change!
<writes the usual passwod>
- The password must be over 50 characters long!
<adds more letters>
- The password must have numbers!
<adds some numbers, though it's getting irritating>
- The password must have special characters!
<wtf?? Adds a pound character>
- The password must have at least 20 different special characters!
<da fuq???>
- The password must be at least 50 characters, only special characters and invisible tab/LF/CR characters and it must be changed daily!
<head explodes>
- Thank you! Now please sign in with your new password for 200 times per day.
<closes the laptop and starts using Remington type writer>

Usually these remainders start popping up during the 1st vacation day. When you return to the office, the account is already locked.

And then you wonder why people have the passwords written on a post-it or as a plain txt file in SkyDrive.

I hate that I have to be careful of what I say about specific languages so that I don't hurt peoples feelings. If you get upset because someone called Java or PHP ugly, get over it.

All languages are shit. If you have a favorite, good for you. IMO you only limit yourself if you think that .Net is always the answer, or if you think that every project needs to be in a JVM.

We often forget to ask why a language exists before we start to use it. No sane person is going to use Java to develop a quick one time script. Same can be said for all languages.

So when someone tells you, "Python sucks" they probably mean, "Python sucks for this use case". Except for Perl.

Fuck Perl.

Regarding Article 13 (or 17 or wherever it moved to now)… Let's say that the UK politicians decide to be dicks and approve the law. After that, we need to get it engineered in, right? Let's talk a bit about how.. well, I'd maybe go over it. Been thinking about it a bit in the shower earlier, so.. yeah.

So, fancy image recognition or text recognition from articles scattered all over the internet, I think we can all agree.. that's infeasible. Even more so, during this lobby with GitHub and OpenForum Europe, guy from GitHub actually made a very valid point. Now for starters, copyright infringement isn't an issue on the platform GitHub that pretty much breathes collaboration. But in the case of I-Boot for example, that thing from Apple that got leaked earlier. If that would get preemptively blocked.. well there's no public source code for it to get compared against to begin with, right? So it's not just "scattered all over the internet, good luck crawling it", it's nowhere to be found *at all*.

So content filtering.. yeah. Nope, ain't gonna happen. Keep trying with that, EU politicians.

But let's say that I am a content creator who hates the cancer of joke/meme because more often than not it manifests itself as a clone of r/programmerhumor.. someone decides to freeboot my content. So I go out, look for it, find it. Facebook and the likes, make it easier to find it in the first place, you dicks. It's extremely hard to find your content there.

So Facebook implements a way to find that content a bit easier maybe. Me being the content creator finds it.. oh blimey! It can't be.. it's the king of freebooting on Facebook, SoFlo! Who would've thought?! So at that point.. I'd like to get it removed of course. Report it as copyright infringement? Of course. Again Facebook you dicks, don't make it so tedious to fill in that bloody report. And look into it quickly! The videos those SoFlo dicks post is only relevant in the first 48h or so. That's where they make the most money. So act more quickly.

So the report is filled, video's taken down.. what else? Maybe temporarily make them unable to post as a bit of a punishment so that they won't do it again? And put in a limit to the amount of reports they can receive. Finally, maybe reroute the revenue stream to the original content creator instead. That way stolen content suddenly becomes free exposure! Awesome!

*suddenly realizes that I've been talking about the YouTube copyright strike system all along*

… Well.. maybe something like that then? That shouldn't be too hard to implement, and on YouTube at least it seems to be quite effective. Just imagine SoFlo and the likes that are repeat offenders, every 3 posts they get their account and page shut down. Good luck growing an audience that way. And good luck making new accounts all the time to start with.. account verification technology is pretty good these days. Speaking of experience here, tried bypassing Facebook's signup hoops a fair bit and learned a bit about some of the things they have red flags on, hehe.

But yeah, something like that maybe for social media in general. And.. let's face it, the biggest one that would get hurt by something like this would be Facebook. And personally I think it's about time for that bastard company to get a couple of blows already.

What are your thoughts on this?

Fuck Homestead.

For the fortune of you not to know, Homestead is a sad attempt at a Wix-like build your own website platform.

However, Homestead is the most unusable piece of shit platform that humans have ever had the misery of interacting with

Lets start off with the login page. The login page is small, unresponsive and half the time just deletes your input whenever you press submit.

It's important to note that unless you're running MacOS or Windows, Homestead will send to an error page on which there's a link to contact support, but pressing that link requires MacOS or Windows.

Fine, I'll fiddle around with my user-agent, and we'll be in soon enough. But now we come to the joy that is the website editor itself.

The website editor is clunky, hard to use, and has enough menus and submenus and sidebars to make the Jira UI shake with fear. Each interface option label is either ridiculously ambiguous or just straight up wrong. The built-in HTML editor doesn't support HTML5, in the name of "browser compatibility".

CSS? Pah! Who needs it! Our psuedo-90s skeuomorphic ugly-as-shit prebuilt styles will work just fine. Responsive design? Bullshit! Nobody uses a smartphone to browse the web, so why do we need to handle it?

Uploading a file? Good fucking luck buddy. There's a complicated dance among the minefield of pop-ups that ask you to confirm some shit or modify some shit and you gotta click the right option each time or else the file won't upload.

Wanna use https like 86% of the entire web and all modern websites? That's a premium feature. Fork over an extra $10 a month

Ok ok, I made it through all that. Dig through the thousands of menus to find the 'publish changes' button, and sigh with relief.

Open up a private browser tab to check my work, and nope. The site looks like shit, even by Homestead's standards. That's because Homestead claims to be a WYSIWYG editor, but it's a damn lie. The site looks like shit, so it's time do dive back into the hellhole that is this damn site editor.

And rinse and repeat. Deal with the shitty editor, publish, and pray it doesn't look like garbage. Be too scared to test on other devices because this flaming pile of dog shit pretending to be a website is bad enough on my device.

Two more months, then I'm done with this client. Someone get me a drink

I'm halfway in on a six-month disaster contract where I'm converting a massive site written over 7~8 years to a new system. Manager has had us restart about 4 times and there are other departments who want to take over. The deadline is so tight that I've stuck with the original plan and kept my code flexible to be changed if the manager wants to go with the other teams' ideas. ("Okay, manager: here's a clone, tell the other team to prove that works") The lead dev, to my horror, didn't write any code and was let go in November.

Manager hired a new dev part-time whose commitment is on something entirely separate that is required in order for the deadline to be pushed to Summer. (new thing for old thing)

New dev has an attitude, basically wants to start over, and is already acting like I'm his subordinate, very patronizing, very dodgy when asked to explain a strong opinion (THIS IS A SECURITY PROBLEM!!!1). I really have no idea what my manager promised to him. Also found out that manager hired an agency to create a roadmap of the project (WHY?!!! WHY NOW?!). I've been burned once already with the previous lead, and I'm not wild about working with yet another person who wants to burn the whole thing to the ground and start completely over, especially not someone who wants to engage in a dick-measuring contest.

Do you guys have any advice? I mean, other than quitting? I'm going to see this through, but I'm burned out.

What the hell! Every time someone comes over to my desk and stands behind me my brain disengages from my fingers an I start misspelling and doing wrong commands etc..

Just one more reason everyone should have private office.

Just realizing now that I've probably spent 60% of my programmer age (years of experience) waiting for dependencies to install and praying that the 9 kB/s connection I'm struggling with remains alive every single fucking time otherwise I have to start the wait all over. 😡😡😡

so i ordered free samples of microcontrollers because i didnt want to waste money... in the receipt, i saw Oct 28, 2017 and im like oh cool i guess ill receive it on that date.

today they sent me an email saying they have already shipped the package today and im like wtf why just now and i looked over the receipt again and saw:

SHIPMENT DATE: October 28, 2017

i swear to god i flippes shit because it may actually arrive in a month or two and the project has to be submitted in a month. goddamit and there is no other way! i have to buy it :(( the worst part of it is that i have another set of microcontrollers TO BE SHIPPED in January. theyre for the next project which should be submitted in January.

lesson: TIME IS FUCKING GOLD. if u want free sample, order them at least 3 months before u start the project.

Spent around 5 hours last night trying to do honestly one of the most basic things in PHP with a classmate of mine.
We are making a website kind of like Google Photos where the user can upload their images, store some information about the images they uploaded. (Basically just an online photo storage site). For what ever damn reason we could not figure out why our images that the user would upload from a form where not being put into their associated user image folder; Hell for the longest time they weren't even being loaded onto our LAMP server.
We still have no fucking idea what made it start working, we went over our code and iterated it probably over a hundred times and suddenly..... Like I said we have no fucking clue why; it started to work.
Over 2 hours in a hangouts call and around 500 messages later it worked.
I think we all know how this feels.

What a fucking mess.

So it's been awhile since I switched from PHP to Golang.

At first I missed PHP a lot, but golang really has some advantages, so its fine.

But over time, and when the project grows in features, I more and more and more start to miss more and more at least basic classes / inheritance and abstraction friendly stuff from php.

Im finally reaching the point where I start to truly miss php, I can't stop myself after writing a feature to think how much less work that would be in php.

Call me crazy, but damn, it's real.

Most successful? Well, this one kinda is...

So I just started working at the company and my manager has a project for me. There are almost no requirements except:
- I want a wireless device that I can put in a box
- I want to be able to know where that device is with enough accuracy to be able to determine in which box the device was put in if multiple boxes were standing together

So, I had to make a real time localization system. RTLS.
A solo project.

Ok, first a lot of experiments. What will the localization technique be? Which radio are we going to use?
How will the communication be structured?

After about two months I had tested a lot, but hadn't found THE solution. So I convinced my manager to try out UWB radio with Time Difference Of Arrival as localization technique. This couldn't be thrown together quickly because it needed more setup.

Two months later I had a working proof of concept. It had a lot of problems because we needed to distribute a clock signal because the radio listeners needed to be sub-nanosecond synchronous to achieve the accuracy my manager wanted. That clock signal wasn't great we later found out.

The results were good enough to continue to work on a prototype.
This time all wired communication would be over ethernet and we'd use PTP to synchronize the time.

Lockdown started.

There was a lot of trouble with getting the radio chip to work on the prototype, ethernet was tricky and the PTP turned out to be not accurate enough. A lot of dev work went into getting everything right.

A year and 5 hardware revisions later I had something that worked pretty well!
All time synchronization was done hybridly on the anchors and server where the best path to the time master was dynamically found.

Everything was synchronized to the subnanosecond. In my bedroom where I had my test setup I achieved an accuracy of about 30cm in 3d. This was awesome!

It was time to order the actual prototype and start testing it for real in one of the factory halls.

The order was made for 40 anchors and an appointment was made for the installation in the hall.

Suddenly my manager is fired.

Oh...
Ehh... That sucks. Well, let's just continue.

The hardware arrives and I prepare everything. Everything is ready and I'm pretty nervous. I've put all my expertise in this project. This is gonna make my career at this company.

Two weeks before the installation was to take place, not even a month after my manager was fired, I hear that my project was shelved.

...
...

Fuck

"We're not prioritizing this project right now" they said.

...

It would've been so great! And they took it away.
Including my salary and hardware dev cost, this project so far has cost them over €120k and they just shelved it.

I was put on other projects and they did try to find me something that suited me.

But I felt so betrayed and the projects we're not to my liking, so after another 2-3 months I quit and went to my current job.

It would've so nice and they ruined it.
Everything was made with Rust. Tags, anchors, RTLS server, web server & web frontend.

So yeah, sorry for the rambling.

Why is the interviewing process becoming worse over the years?

About 2 years ago I applied for a company and got into 2 interviews: one with the hr to see if I am bsing them and one with the tech people, to be sure I am not using buzzwords without context. Pretty straightforward, could be done in a single interview IMHO, but it's making me waste max 2 weeks.

Fast forward to one year ago: 1 interview with the hr, 1 interview with the tech people, 1 interview with CEO (why? Just.. why?)

Fast forward to today: 1 interview with hr, 1 interview with tech people, 1 interview with the CEO (again... why?), 1 coding assignment which "it's only going to take a couple of hours" and punctually has either poorly documented APIs to rely on or has trick questions/points. So "it takes a couple of hours", but if you want to pass it you need to spend a day on it... (and let's add that they may be using old docker versions so if it doesn't work cause they are using docker 1.0 and it fails too bad, you lost time for nothing, we are not trying to solve it, you just don't pass!).

Not kidding the last assignment I took and dropped required: external API, testing, don't use CSS libraries and make your own CSS, you must use TS and it was supposed to take "3 hours max".

My question is: why? Why is the interviewing process slowly becoming less of a: "I understand that your code may not be perfect for us but that you are a human being able to reason and adapt your code to our standards" and more of a: "You must do everything PERFECTLY and we don't give a sh*t about your time, start giving us your free time and then we see if we want you."

I just keep giving up after I analyze the assignments, cause a part of my brain thinks that if this is the way a professional relationship starts it's too easy to foresee weekend shifts and lots of overtime cause some manager thinks that "come on, it just takes a couple of hours!"

When I wrote my first algorithm that learns...

So in order to on board our customers onto our software we have to link the product on their data base to the products on ours. This seems easy enough but when you actually start looking at their data you find it's a fuck up of duplication's, bad naming conventions and only 10% or so have distinct identifiers like a suppler code,model no or barcode. After a week or 2 they find they can't do it and ask for our help and we take over. On average it took 2 of our staff 1-2 weeks to complete the task manually searching one record of theirs against our db at a time. This was a big problem since we only had enough resources to on board 2-4 customers a month meaning slow growth.

I realized when looking at different customers databases that although the data was badly captured - it was consistently badly captured similar to how crap file names will usually contain the letters 'asd' because its typed with the left hand.

I then wrote an algorithm that fuzzy matched against our data and the past matches of other customers data creating a ranking algorithm similar to google page search. After auto matching the majority of results the top 10 ranked search results for each product on their db is shown to a human 1 at a time and they either click the the correct result or select "no match" and repeat until it is done at which point the algo will include the captured data in ranking future results.

It now takes a single staff member 1-2 hours to fully on board a customer with 10-15k products and will continue to get faster and adapt to changes in language and naming conventions. Making it learn wasn't really my intention at the time and more a side effect of what I was trying to achieve. Completely blew my mind.

Phonegap, when you are using the dev app: yeah nice seems to work fine

Phonegap, when you start the compiled app: welp time to run over my dick with a truck

IMHO technical dept is kind of like smoking cigarettes for some decades.

You were told that shit will hit the fan but you do not take proper action. And one day you'll realize that you fucked up (or not, also seen that).

Worked for a company in IT, where we maintained an ERP which was "in progress" for over a decade. The basic implementation was done by people with zero technical understanding. To clarify: not self coded. Software was bought. We are talking about integrating the system.

Therefore, the foundation was like a wet noodle. When I joined that company, I told them that they need to address that. I told them that things will get slower and slower and that shit will hit the fan if no proper actions taken.
Even made a list with flaws I found. With potential risk and actions to take, that could then be measured.

At that time, five people worked in said department (including me).

People did not want to listen. "Would be too expensive to rewrite stuff".

Nothing has changed about the wet noodle, but I tried to fix as many things in a working system as I could. Felt like heart surgery, because changes got implemented and "tested" in prod. No version control, no documentation, everyone implemented things like they felt (no guidelines for consistency).
A lot of small fuckups that summed up over the years.

I left the company after two years because I had the chance to land a job as a dev.

Been around two years now since I left. Now 9 people work in that department with around the same efficiency as us 5 people back then.

The new employees struggle to be productive, because things are just implemented poorly and not maintainable anymore.

Had some dialogs with them some time ago. Everything I told them would happen, actually happened. What a suprise :-|
I will not go into too much detail about all the shit that's going on there, as it would be just too much (and my morning coffe is almost finished).

I think that we all know the difference between "not beautiful, but does the job" and "oh, that will backfire - badly". And I wish that my communication skills increase so that people start listening in future.

So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.

Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.

So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.

So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.

So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(

The biggest hurdle I overcame on my dev career was coming back to a full time job after a few years spent on a "hippie phase" combining work as an artisan, content developer and editor, and just a few freelance dev jobs. It was all a struggle to start again thinking of myself as "junior again" surrounded by people ten or fifteen years younger than me. But I kept myself over the tidal web and here I am, a Senior again.

Workload rant.

Our new line manager is overly expecting from all of us (product/design/tech) and is micro managing on ground level without having any real sense of reality. He just wants everything to be built overnight.

He is smart, no doubt about that. But guess, I learnt from him what I had to. Not to stereotype but he is a typical Indian manager who keeps pushing boundaries.

He just added 80 features for Q1 roadmap with on 3 PMs, 1 Designer, 1TPM, and bunch of techies .

What the actual fuck! 😂😂😂 And he wanted to add more, thankfully we ran out of time in the meeting.

And my super talent and genius blabbering co-woker who works mechanically just fucked herself real bad. Lol

I kept telling her not to add Feature XYZ to the roadmap because:
1. There'll be spill over from Q4
2. She is already overloaded with 1 task and keeps crying all day about being unable to handle it
3. She is setting wrong expectations with management for herself and rest of the team
4. Boss will add more work and she'll be fucked

She was adamant and did not listen.

Now this is what happened:
1. ALL her Q4 items got pushed to Q1. LMFAO
2. She was literally crying since morning on calls for being overloaded and we are yet to start Q1 assignments
3. Additional tasks along side feature XYZ were added on her plate

I tried to push back the manager and that's when he said okay, let's keep some items for Q2.

But holy shit. 80 features between such a small team and wanted to done in few weeks.

I need to pump more steam in my job hunt activity. This place is ridiculously toxic.

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

I just spent weeks working on a device driver on linux for a project I'm working on for uni, and for whatever reason, I only thought to cat the device I'm trying to read now. It turns out the output is already exactly what I want and I just wasted a monumental amount of time for nothing. I'm about to start screaming over how stupid I am

Our team - if ever existed - is falling apart. Pressure raising. Release deadline probably failing. No release ready for Big Sur.

Almost seemed we were getting somewhere: More focus on code quality, unit tests, proper design, smaller classes. But somehow we now ended up in "microservice" hell; a gazillion classes, mostly tested in isolation, but together they just fail to do their job. A cheap and dirty proof of concept from March is still more capable than this pile. I really start to doubt all that "Clean code", TDD, Agility rhetorics. What does it help you, if nobody cares for the end result? It's like a month I try to hammer down that message: we have to have testable artifacts, we have to ensure code signing works, our artifact is packaged and installable, we have to give QA something they can test - but time just passes and this piece of shit software is still being killed or does nothing.

Now my knee is broken and can do no sports and are tied to my chair even more. To top it all my coffee machine broke and my internet connection was abysmal this week. Not the usual small disconnects, after which it would recover, but more annoying and enduring: often being throttled to 1.7 MB/s (ranking my connection in the slowest 7% even in Germany). My RDP sessions had compression artifacts all over the screen and a mouse click would only take effect 5 sec later.

But my Esspresso machine was just repaired. Not all hope is lost.

I am a junior web developer, currently working in my first job for a small company, I was hired because I have an interest in meteor and modern web dev.

When I say small I mean I am the only full time js dev.

So the project we are working (my first ever professional project from start to finish) is a travel booking web app (being a little vague, for the sake of privacy). I am the lead developer, as a new programmer of a project that is far from trivial. There are no other javascript devs in office, no sort of code review. We have an outsourced dev but as I got in a flow with one dev my boss supposedly told him to do it part time (without discussing with me), but haven't heard anything from him, so assuming he's just disappeared (probably annoyed at being treated like a commodity).

Boss has set up the stages, and forces me to move on to the next stage before that stage has been finished. I will have to go back over the whole thing to finish things off.

He will only hire cheap juniors, one front end guy with barely any experience is styling the site.

He is used to churning out WordPress and Magento sites.

Wish I had a senior I could learn off.

I want to stick at this project and see it through, but i can only see it ending in a train wreck.

At the same time I want out, I want to work under a better team with senior programmers and better code review.

I just have to do my best and see how it goes I guess

I covered it in a recent rant but it was for a marketing lead job (career switch for me) and they were very disorganized.

The HR guy just couldn’t shut up about completely irrelevant and personal topics. The CEO made fun of my cognitive disability, calling it “an excuse” (illegal in the U.S. under anti-discrimination laws). Then he walked out of the room to “go to the bathroom” and never returned. The HR guy grabbed the CEO’s notes and just read them to himself out loud like I wasn’t even in the room. He also asked me what my religion was (also illegal to ask in the U.S.) A third guy came in, asked me a bunch of questions, and then abruptly ended the interview. They only gave me a vague idea of the salary and benefits in all of that.

Two days later the HR guy asked me to come in immediately because I was needed to begin work right then. I said I hadn’t planned to start just that quickly (I already had plans that day that I couldn’t cancel) and especially not knowing how much I’d be paid. I asked for the customary time to talk it over with my family first. He asked me to get back to him before an hour was up. When I called back, he switched the story to say that their marketing lead just wanted to ask me questions before they made a final decision. But the fact that they had been interviewing me for that very marketing lead position was really confusing.

I said I was no longer interested and hung up the phone.

Because I didn't start coding until 21 I constantly feel behind, but the pure satisfaction from finally getting something to work or to see a project grow iteratively over time keeps the gears turning. The bad part is I feel like I am constantly stressed because of my feelings of always being inadequate. The thing is I didn't only have to learn how to code but I basically had to start from scratch tech wise. i had a decent acer laptop in high school and basically just web browsed and gamed with it. So needless to say most of my life has been away from a computer. Now I feel at a constant rush to compensate for my ignorance. I have slowly become more introverted because I feel like if I don't work on my skill set everyday I stray further away from making myself marketable; this has caused me to become more irritable and to close myself inside more. I want to make a career doing this and I also have the added pressure of not having a degree, so projects and skills are even more mandatory. I truly love programming to the fullest extend, but not having local friends to express code with and to bounce concepts and ideas off of is torture. But I try to keep my head up and make progress out of the day- if the will is there- so I can land my first job as a developer and actually make a living doing something that brings me a little piece of meaning. So overall there is a tradeoff of having added pressure, stress, anxiety and sometimes depression to build a craft that still has ages to go to reach a stage of maturity.

My family keeps telling me the same old story over and over again about me when I was 3 years old, holding a Gameboy in my hands, cheering each time Mario died (due to the failure theme I'd guess, didn't have any other sadistic tendencies though). Over the years my gaming ambitions became a little more purposeful. ;)

However it's not surprising that I started thinking about how games are developed and how I can start my own.

So when I was around 14 I went to the local library and borrowed the first game development book striking my eye.. unfortunately it was about Delphi. But hey, I was young and naive.

Surprisingly, I didn't surrender back then.. but to be honest, I do not recall one line of Delphi. :D

Long long time ago when recharge coupons we a thing, I used to try out more codes in the series and waste my time. After failing a lot over this, I started trying out different USSD codes to see what other stuff is out there. This got me to stumble upon facebook and twitter on USSD. I'm not sure now but, twitter was probably *515# from my carrier.

Facebook. I remember chatting for quite a long period using this. Very slow and limited yet, fun. The USSD message expires within ~60secs. so you have to type the chat message before that or you lose everything you typed. The phone was no smartphone that would allow me to copy the text from the USSD input. On top of that panic, was a character limit to these messages. I remember hitting send while being midway through a message just so I don't lose what I typed, on a T-9 keyboard. Still miss those!

The person on the other side would receive a half message due to this, and would start replying without any patience, to which I panicked as now there's a new thing to respond to, and a half message which I'm waiting to complete.

Later over the weekend when I was allowed to visit the cyber cafe for an hour or two with 15-30 INR, reading the chat threads, being able to use the five sticker packs:) and thus continuing on a computer was fun. But, as the time at the cafe expires, I had to immediately shut off my session or I'd be charged more. Thus, I was left in the middle of a conversation again, and had to continue over USSD.

Using social media without any internet like this was quite fun in a weird way. If I get a new message, I'd get a USSD alert, and then an sms if I didn't reply in some 10-15mins!

This had all the features like like and comment. Friend requests too. For the posts in a "timeline" which was new and fancy in those days, all you see is the caption of a post which also gets truncated quite a bit as USSD also has to show it's options like:
1. Like
2. Comment
3. Next Post
4. Main Menu

This was around '13 or '14 I guess. After which I later got my first computer- a laptop. Anyways, the tactile feel of pressing the buttons on a T-9 keypad is nostalgic to me. 😅 And if you were a pro at texting, u must hv used shrtcts lyk dis too w/ emojis lyk :-) <3

1. Find a decent, entry level job at a company for full time
2. Graduate from my two year tech school with my degree
3. Apply/start at a university for my Bachelor's degree.
4. Start actually building my database application project. Its been on the back burner for over a year.
5. Try not to be so doubtful or unsure of dev skills. Try being less anxious to ask for advice or explanations, and dont let lack of knowledge discourage or embarrass me from growing my skills.

TL;DR: I'm stressed out over choosing a side project because of the commitment and fear of failure :(

I'm a student and summer vacation starts in 3 days (and actually has already started for me, thanks to a "smartly planned" hospital stay), so I'm currently looking for a cool project to start. This will be my third summer vacation during which I want to make complete a project, and I never actually did it. The first year, I couldn't think of any reasonable, doable project which would be interesting and fitting for the time scope (I was quite new to programming back then, so I probably couldn't have done things that would be interesting to me, an any project that I could've done would just take 20 minutes, cause I wouldn't understand anything more complex). The second time, I chose a project too big with too much new things I had to learn on the go. I actually pushed through for nearly a week, but then I realized that I only completed like 25% in that time, so I lost my motivation, thinking I could never finish it, while not wanting to start a complete new project, because that would've felt like wasting the time I put into my first project. It was still a valuable project and I learned a lot by doing it, but this year I want to actually finish a project; so I'm really stressed out right now trying to come up with a good project.
Usually I have millions of vague ideas in my head, but as soon as it comes to choosing, every single one seems to be the wrong one, or I forget about all of them. Everything that kinda interests me seems way to big and complicated to me, but I sometimes feel like I'm just underestimating my abilities, but on the other hand I have ~25 projects on my hard drive, of which 4 or 5 are finished and most will never be finished. :/
And it's just so overwhelming to choose something like that, because on one hand I really want to do a bigger project that I actually finish, and summer vacation is the only time I have so much time to code, and I love coding, but on the other hand choosing such a project that I will work 2-3 weeks on is too much commitment and also I'm anxious about failing it and never finish it, just abandon a buggy mess. Am I the only one to feel that way, or are you too having problems choosing side problems?

And, I guess if you have any ideas for a suitable project (literally anything, so that I might be exposed to some new ideas), just comment it.

My biggest personal challenge as a dev is learning and retaining, as well as keeping current, any particular language. I swear I really did build a career as an HTML/JS/CSS programmer. I have a resume that shows I did. But for some reason, lately, every time I open an editor I feel like I'm starting over from 22 years ago. Everything I do nowadays is copy/paste from StackOverflow, hiring another dev to help out, or cribbing code from past projects. I'd love to be able to just open Sublime and start coding like a badass like I imagine other coders do, but I just can't even get started. WTF is wrong with me?

So it's friday and I'm almost done with all my work and suddenly manager comes in and asks me that client wants to talk to you. I agree and we move into meeting room here is how conversation goes
(C)lient-There is some new feature we want to add -/Describes his feature which is somewhat like an existing feature we have. The feature needs many images which area already present/-
(M)e-Ohkay this can be done. How much time is allotted.
C- You can take a month or two -/I have fucking happy fucking over the moon beacuse i knew it wouldn't take more than 2 days-/
M-Sure
C- Yeah make sure the images are rotated manually.
M-*In Shock* Manually? You mean like i have to right click and then select rotate -/in which ever direction you mother is getting fucked?-/
C-Yeah..
M- But there is a tool which can do the same thing!
C-No the tool maybe wrong we want 100 percent accuracy.
M-*For a while like this -_-* I can start the tool and then manually check if any image is wrongly rotated.
C-No you can be wrong sometimes. .
-/Meanwhile the manager is giving me a stern look like/-
M-If i can be wrong after running tool why i can't BE WRONG WHEN I HAVE TO ROTATE THE IMAGE 10000 TIMESSSSS
C- do it manually.
*He cuts the call!*
I have no fucking option now! THESE FUCKING CLIENT'S AND THEIR BALL LICKING MANAGER FUCK MY LIFE FUCK MY JOB
I'LL DO IT BY SCRIPT ONLY FIRE ME YOU FUCKING MORONS
ASSHOLLESSS

If you don't know what clearing cache does to the state of the fatherfucking app then why do you fucking clear it? It fucking breaks the flow. Your maggot-infested ass is then coming up with his own explanation why you cleared the fucking cache. If you don't even have a cunt of an idea why we use the app's local storage, why do you fucking do it? You neanderthal rotten piece of sun-baked shit.

Hey, the app was taking to much time to send the request, so I cleared the app data. Now I have to login again and start over. Maybe check your fucking internet connection?

Fuck you. Fuck your cunt of a face. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. FUCKING FUCK YOU.

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

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

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

How in the fuck do you start getting clients as a freelancer? Do I just throw stuff on my GitHub and pray someone hits me up on Fiverr? Upwork won't accept my account and it's been fucking four months of me trying. I took to becoming a full-time designer to push our startup's products to completion but a fucking failure over there too everytime.

Everything is a fucking shitfest and I'm just whining at this point but I needed to take this off of my fucking chest. A good fucking day to you too.

Imagine you work in a mechanic’s shop. You just got trained today on a new part install, including all the task-specific tools it takes to install it.

Some are standard tools, like a screwdriver, that most people know how to use. Others are complicated, single-purpose tools that only work to install this one part.

It takes you a couple of hours compared to other techs who learned quicker than you and can do it in 20 minutes. You go to bed that night thinking “I’ve got this. I’ll remember how this works tomorrow and I’ll be twice as fast tomorrow as I was today.”

The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only about 5% on how to use the specialized tools and installation of the part.

You retrain that day as a review, but your install time still suffers in comparison. You again feel confident by the end of the day that you understand and go to bed thinking you’ll at least get within 10-20 minutes of the faster techs in your install.

The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only 10% on how to use the specialized tools.

Repeat until you reach 100% mastery and match the other techs in speed and efficiency.

Oops! Scratch that! We are no longer using those tools or that part. We’re switching to this other thing that somehow everyone already knows or understands quickly. Start over.

This has been my entire development career. I’m so tired.

Alright, it looks like everyone at this bank, a client, I work for will now start avoiding me. I'm usually the only person that takes the time to review PRs and give a feedback. Everyone just seem to click accept because they can't be bothered.

A few months down the line, they begin to wonder why there is so many tech all over the place.

Good luck to anyone that wants me to review their PRs. I pledge to continue to take the time to review PRs and give feedback. I will not be pressured to click the accept button on what I perceive to be sub-optimal code. So help me God.

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.

Finally over this sickness I think. Time to start coding again :)

My worst team experience finished only a week ago:

- Be me
- be averaging 80% in completed modules and on track for a 1st
- have to take a team project worth double credits
- get stuck in random team with 40%ers
- lose 1 artist at the start (team of 12: 6 artists, 6 programmers)
- 2 artists contribute nothing and disappear for a few weeks
- I'm forced to do level design to have something to show (looked good tbh)
- weeks go by and too many contribute very little.
- by the end the team was basically 4 programmers and 2 artists contributing.

All other teams basically get an easy 2:1/1st just because their team turns up and contributes.

I could lose a 1st because of this module bringing down everything else, it also had a huge effect on what I could achieve for my dissertation due to time.

- did get an award at the end for managing to not kill someone and showing restraint 😂😂

Basically don't choose a degree where more than 25% of your mark is almost entirely out of your hands.

The small individual component I averaged over 90%!

This is 1:05AM and this is the 3rd time I start over my question to Stack Overflow because I don't know what the fuck is going on with jQuery UI, and when I finally get it, Google finds me both the question and the answer of the same and only dude that had the same problem than me FIVE FUCKING YEARS AGO and he couldn't solve it.

Fuck this, tomorrow I'll start over with VueJS.

!dev
This boring story with stupid ending started on Monday with me going out to buy some food and cook something delicious, day like always until my mind went nuts.

I work from home and cook my meals by myself cause I love cooking.
To buy ingredients I go shopping couple times a week always making the same steps, doing this for over a year now and by this time everything was automatic so I could think about work problems and solutions.

I start usually by getting up from my desk around noon, not many people doing shopping at that time and I can proceed quick.
Algorithm is like this: go to kitchen and look at the fridge, go out, wait for traffic lights, take tram, ride two stops, wait for the traffic lights again, go to supermarket, do shopping and finally go back the same way. Boooring.

When I get out from tram that day l looked at traffic lights to go green, as always and that’s the place where everything started to go bad.

So I was waiting there doing nothing and then stupid idea got me.
I figured out I can stop looking at light to make this day different and look ahead.
Then simply start walking when people from other side start walking.

It worked smoothly on those lights and I was happy I can do things differently from now on. I proceed with this idea on the way back and motherfuckers started walking on red. Twice !!!!
Almost died.

Since then three times some car was driving on green near me in those places and people started walking on red.

It got me worried about world determinism instantly. I might increased some entropy to much and some world developer changed some line of code while I was shopping and from that time death is passing by me.

Now it got me to the point where the more I follow this way the more I am worried about my life. Started thinking about ordering ingredients online.

So if you read this you know that I know your plan and I will be changing supermarkets and paths to it randomly starting from next week.

Or not I hope nobody hacked my mind and only thing that read and write to it is my consciousness.

I feel relief now.

The agency I own built a WordPress plugin for a client using a freelancer developer. The client, out of ambivalence, withheld information that would have drastically changed the design of the plugin, but by the time we found out it was much to late to start over. The developer moved overseas in the middle of it all and from then on was not very responsive to communications about the project which delayed things by months. I tried to find a replacement developer but nobody else had experience with the third-party API. The live version of the API ended up not being able to support what we were trying to get it to do with the plugin even though the test version of the API was fine and the vendor was unhelpful. And because we spent so much time and money on the plugin, we weren’t able to even begin on another part of the project. The client complained of over $30,000 in lost revenue due to these issues. Complete fail all around. I’m never doing another custom software project again. It’s all just website design from here.

I think JavaScript is great actually

Though I don't like the community

But that's not saying much, aside from maybe c++ people (who I don't actually understand so maybe that's what's going on there) I don't seem to like any communities

Mostly because they're wrong and fight over irrelevant things and don't realize they're wrong so they just keep going wrong and it makes me cringe

But javascript is nice because it's intuitive, and if it isn't intuitive to you right now just look into the thing and it'll be a second language to you later... Isn't that a skill issue?
Easy to start hard to master, perfect difficulty curve. Exploits that sunk cost fallacy. It isn't overwhelming either you only run into the edge cases slowly over time.

But there can be a point made that an easily accessible anything is just always going to turn into a cesspool because unskilled people keep contributing and thinking themselves experts, so it over time reduces quality of secondary tooling =[

It's funny how you start feeling bad for the next dev taking over your project because it turned into a total spaghetti code shit show that will be impossible to maintain in the future with new features coming in.

Honestly... if a projects starts out with a certain scope which then gets extended EVERY FUCKING WEEK with requirements that can't even be met in the initial timeframe it's no wonder the code quality will decrease over time.

This just reminds me daily how important good project management (and I'm not talking about suit wearing pain-in-the-ass-managers) and the inclusion of devs in the planning process really is.

It's so fucking crazy that companies run like that with people up front that have NO FUCKING CLUE what they are doing, nor do they understand the mechanics, tech and effort that go into certain features. They're like "beep, boop, it's done by Friday you fuck!".

The funniest part of this stupid charade is that the closer we get to a new "deadline" (we will not meet the deadline anyways) the more nervous the "managers" get. WHY didn't you properly plan this shit in the first place? WHY didn't you care for the last six months where all this fucking bullshit could still have been prevented?

Meanwhile I'm just so sick and tired of this shitty project and this sucky company that I just don't have any motivation left to keep on working. It's so fucking hard and painful to work on projects that suck ass, are poorly designed. I just got to the point where coding is no fun any more. Thank god I'm out of here soon... fml