TL;DR: One of my coworkers is a genius engineer and doesn't get as much recognition as he deserves, whereas another extremely mediocre engineer on the team gets praised for his crappy applications.

We have one engineer on our team (let's call him Hank) who started with me at the company when we were interns, and man is he a freaking genius. I swear, you could give this guy any language/library/framework, and he'll be fluent in it in less than a week. He's singlehandedly written two of our most complex applications by himself, and has a great sense of UX as well. All of his apps look fantastic.

The problem is, I feel like he doesn't get anywhere near as much recognition as he should. I try to talk him up to our manager, and our manager knows that Hank is smart, but he also overlooks him for promotions and praise because he's a little spacey (he's got quite the case of ADD) and doesn't speak up very often. He's got trouble focusing sometimes, but when he's in the zone, he can write an exponentially better and more complex application in 2 days than some of our other engineers can do in 4 months.

For example, we have another engineer on our team (let's call him Phil,) and the entire team has their heads so far up Phil's butt that I'm surprised they haven't suffocated yet. Don't get me wrong, he's a smart guy. He's great with the more basic aspects of our job, but when it comes to writing an application, he has no idea what he's doing, and he takes months to write something that should have taken him days. Then when he finally releases it, it's riddled with bugs. But everybody praises and bows down to him for it. "Oh Phil, this app is amazing. You're a genius, you deserve to be a Lead." Then we have Hank sitting quietly at his desk, banging out his 3rd big application of the month, and people say "Eh, nobody's going to use those apps anyway. He's wasting time." And I'm standing there thinking, "You asshats, we already have a solution for the app that Phil wrote, and the entire company is already using it. It's exponentially better, why did you let him waste time writing this when there's already an existing solution?!"

Oh well, I hope Hank gets some recognition soon. He certainly deserves it.

> Customer calls
Her: I have over 5k 404 request to [insertwebsite]/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml
Me: Sound like a missconfigured exchangeserver/client. Let me have a look.
> Takes a look and can confirm the IP and the owner of that IP
Me: It looks like someone/something from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is failing to resolve autodiscover.[insertdomain].com
and defaults to @ record on the zone. Do you happend to know to whom that IP belongs?
Her: No, and I dont care, just block it. I do not like the 404 that shows up on the summary.
Me: Alright
> Blocks the IP in the firewall.

>>> Fast forward to next day >>>

> Someone calls, it is the same girl
Her: I cant reach my website! Infact, I cant reach anything! WHYYYYYY!!!
> I remember, blocking that IP yesterday...
Me: Oh, can you please visist "minip.se" (whatismyip.com, swedish version) and tell me what you see?
Her: Yes, it is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Me: Do you remember that IP that you request that I block yesterday?
> I can hear the shame coming from the phone.
> Turn out that her collegues did'nt have any mail delivered to them from the time I blocked their IP
> Her boss is really mad
> Atleast she had a cute voice

So this was a couple years ago now. Aside from doing software development, I also do nearly all the other IT related stuff for the company, as well as specialize in the installation and implementation of electrical data acquisition systems - primarily amperage and voltage meters. I also wrote the software that communicates with this equipment and monitors the incoming and outgoing voltage and current and alerts various people if there's a problem.

Anyway, all of this equipment is installed into a trailer that goes onto a semi-truck as it's a portable power distribution system.

One time, the computer in one of these systems (we'll call it system 5) had gotten fried and needed replaced. It was a very busy week for me, so I had pulled the fried computer out without immediately replacing it with a working system. A few days later, system 5 leaves to go work on one of our biggest shows of the year - the Academy Awards. We make well over a million dollars from just this one show.

Come the morning of show day, the CEO of the company is in system 5 (it was on a Sunday, my day off) and went to set up the data acquisition software to get the system ready to go, and finds there is no computer. I promptly get a phone call with lots of swearing and threats to my job. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets.

After the phone call, I decided I needed to try and save my job. The CEO hadn't told me to do anything, but I went to work, grabbed an old Windows XP laptop that was gathering dust and installed my software on it. I then had to build the configuration file that is specific to system 5 from memory. Each meter speaks the ModBus over TCP/IP protocol, and thus each meter as a different bus id. Fortunately, I'm pretty anal about this and tend to follow a specific method of id numbering.

Once I got the configuration file done and tested the software to see if it would even run properly on Windows XP (it did!), I called the CEO back and told him I had a laptop ready to go for system 5. I drove out to Hollywood and the CFO (who was there with the CEO) had to walk about a mile out of the security zone to meet me and pick up the laptop.

I told her I put a fresh install of the data acquisition software on the laptop and it's already configured for system 5 - it *should* just work once you plug it in.

I didn't get any phone calls after dropping off the laptop, so I called the CFO once I got home and asked her if everything was working okay. She told me it worked flawlessly - it was Plug 'n Play so to speak. She even said she was impressed, she thought she'd have to call me to iron out one or two configuration issues to get it talking to the meters.

All in all, crisis averted! At work on Monday, my supervisor told me that my name was Mud that day (by the CEO), but I still work here!

Here's a picture of the inside of system 8 (similar to system 5 - same hardware)

Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) headphones in, whatever music that your mood requires at the time (my taste varies from classical to country to blues to jazz, pop, rock, metal and even heavy metal (growls) at times).

libre.fm is a good source for non-redundant music. The community channel is actually very good. (even though some crap do creep in every once in a while)

If you can zone out the noise around you, have a coffee machine within your chair's (assuming it has wheels) roll-range - you're all good.

PS : There's one problem that you can never rule out - interruptions from people around you, for that, you make a list of predefined answers :

Just found out the backend developer I’m always complaining about. The one who:

- Can’t implement OAuth, and we have to have app users login every 24 hours because we have no way to generate new refresh tokens.

- Who used the phrase “your time zone is not my concern” to avoid building something that would let us inject test data.

- Who’s been debugging a critical bug affecting many users since December.

- Who can’t conduct API tests from external internet (you know, like the way the app will be in the wild) because it takes too much time.

- Who replies to Jira tickets only on a blue moon.

- Who has been 90% of the reason for my blood pressure situation

... is a fucking principal engineer in this company. In pecking order, his opinion should be considered more valuable than mine and everyone on my team.

I’ve just lost the will to live. How are big organizations THIS bad. Seriously, what promotion discussion did he go into

“So, you are a complete and utter bastard, nobody can stand to speak to you and you’ve yet to deliver anything of worth that actually works, over the course of several years ... ... ... interested in having your pay doubled??”

Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?

Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)

------

Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.

So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~

------

Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"

Cue Inigo Montoya.

------

Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?

Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."

------

Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."

I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.

------

Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.

------

I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?

I spent about 5 hours today coding and I was totally in the zone. I'm talking things were working properly, tests were passing, bugs were being squashed all over the place. It was completely amazing, I felt like a god ruling over my code kingdom.

After about 5 straight hours I realized that I needed food so I got up, stretched my legs and had some dinner. Well I sat back down about an hour ago and I am SO far out of the zone. Everything is breaking, I can't focus and I have no idea why. My kingdom was overrun with a plague of bugs in just the short time I paused to eat.

Moral of the story: when you get in the zone don't stop for anything even if it seems like basic human necessity. After all we aren't human when we're in the zone, we are coding gods.

Soms week ago a client came to me with the request to restructure the nameservers for his hosting company. Due to the requirements, I soon realised none of the existing DNS servers would be a perfect fit. Me, being a PHP programmer with some decent general linux/server skills decided to do what I do best: write a small nameservers which could execute the zone transfers... in PHP. I proposed the plan to the client and explained to him how this was going to solve all of his problems. He agreed and started worked.

After a few week of reading a dozen RFC documents on the DNS protocol I wrote a DNS library capable of reading/writing the master file format and reading/writing the binary wire format (we needed this anyway, we had some more projects where PHP did not provide is with enough control over the DNS queries). In short, I wrote a decent DNS resolver.

Another two weeks I was working on the actual DNS server which would handle the NOTIFY queries and execute the zone transfers (AXFR queries). I used the pthreads extension to make the server behave like an actual server which can handle multiple request at once. It took some time (in my opinion the pthreads extension is not extremely well documented and a lot of its behavior has to be detected through trail and error, or, reading the C source code. However, it still is a pretty decent extension.)

Yesterday, while debugging some last issues, the DNS server written in PHP received its first NOTIFY about a changed DNS zone. It executed the zone transfer and updated the real database of the actual primary DNS server. I was extremely euphoric and I began to realise what I wrote in the weeks before. I shared the good news the client and with some other people (a network engineer, a server administrator, a junior programmer, etc.). None of which really seemed to understand what I did. The most positive response was: "So, you can execute a zone transfer?", in a kind of condescending way.

This was one of those moments I realised again, most of the people, even those who are fairly technical, will never understand what we programmers do. My euphoric moment soon became a moment of loneliness...

When you try to schedule interviews in a completely different time zone.

I fucking hate python and myself even more. Python is easy they say, Python has nice syntax but fuck you . Fuck you seriously I cringe if I see non-c-like syntax. Every time I leave my comfort zone I get fucked over by damn semicolons. Fuck this imports i don't know your damn library. But god damn In far too advanced for hello world. There are two versions and the lib I want to use is incompatible? Well fuck me? That kind of shit never hit me on PHP. Damn me! Fuck you python. I want to know you but you fuck me harder than life. GEHÖRT? DU FICKST MICH HÄRTE ALS DAS LEBEN DU HURENSOHN!!!!

What is even your problem? Indentation? Well thank you for not having braces! I mean come on I try, I really do. I know you are different but every thing I want to learn about you is either for uber beginners or so advanced I don't even know what's going on. Do magical shit in a few lines? What the fuck is in those packages? A wizard full filling whishes like "plz make this work"?

But don't worry you cum snorting unicorn as much as I hate you I'm more mad about me for not being a descendant of fucking slytherin!

“Your time zone is not my concern” - manager of the backend team

I asked if there’s another way for us to get test data into QA. That doesn’t involve us staying on until 9pm to get a backend dev to modify the db manually, everyday.

We called it "Project Hindenburg".

A huge planning and logistics app with hundreds of screens and dozens of interwoven subfunctions, suddenly needed to be able to support multiple time zones. Our project was to retrofit every area that touched on dates or times, to allow the user to specify, and work in, any time zone.

At this point in the story I can tell whether you have had to work with time zones in code. People who haven't are butting in with something that begins, "that should be fairly simple, you just need to..." followed by some irrelevant noise that betrays their ignorance.

People who have worked with time zones are nodding in shared pain, like fellow attendees of a survivors meeting.

You see, programmers tend to think of time zones as arithmetic; in reality, they are confusing, ambiguous, chaotic, and individual. You can't translate everything into a central time zone (eg UTC) because you lose the user's intent. For example, if you schedule a meeting for 3pm and then move it to the next day, you want it at 3pm even if the clocks have changed.

Project Hindenburg ended up using the entire development staff of the company for well over a year. It smashed our release projections to rubble, made an already tangled code base completely unmaintainable, introduced mind-bending edge case bugs that reduced staff across the company to tears (literally), and led to most of the mid-level and senior developers eventually quitting (including me).

I am @fuckfuckityfuck, and that was the story of Project Hindenburg.

How I've got my previous job?
Imagine you are in a wild techno club. Dark aisles, A dj from berlin behind the turntables blasting out hard beats, couples kissing on extasy pills.

And there was a friend I've didn't meet in ages. "how do you do?" she asks. "ah... you know i'm on a job hunt for a year i feel misrable". "really? my dad is looking for somebody, send him your resNZNZNZ!" "WHAT? can't hear you!" "Send him your resume!" "Ahhh! okay great!"

So on 24. december 5pm, snow outside, i've sat on wooden table in the kitchen of her father discussing the conditions for the job. It was the start of a crazy time. Dining with millionaires on their Castles. Shaking hands with top businesses leaders. Going to China and having dinner with the 500 richest chinese at once. Wild!

so my advice for you nerds, don't stay in your comfort zone behind the screen on weekends. Vistit a techno club sometimes. You may find a pretty girl/boy with a CEO as a father.

So this bunch of idiots made this huge iOS app using lots of global variables, lots of spaghetti code and basically no separation between logic and UI.
Another bunch of idiots were told to take that iOS app and basically port it to Android. And they ported that same code mess, almost line by line, and adding some weird shit.
Now the HQ of the first bunch of idiots realize that the second bunch of idiots were too slow/inefficient/whatever, and they're now asking US to solve that Android mess and add another shitload of features.
The worst part of it, is that both bunches of idiots are still working on it, so we're basically forced to follow the same shitty style until the first deadline, otherwise we'd die suffocated by stinky merge conflicts. Which will happen anyway because our changes are going to overlap.
Oh, and the PM refuses to understand the disaster coming and there's six hours of time zone difference.

Fuck this shit.

The next time you see developers wearing headphones, please understand that it's our most polite of saying:

"I'm in the freaking 'zone'. Don't you dare disturb my rhythm in coding and lose my momentum. Now unless it's reaaally that important, leave it in our group chat/email and I'll read it later."

Tap gently. We're at overdrive when we headbang to music while coding.

“No we don’t use the time zone info you send on each request. We get all the drivers for the store ID, choose one of them randomly and take their time zone. We have been assuming it will always be the same for all drivers for each store.”

This is my new favorite response to a Jira ticket in this company.

I may have to print it out and hang it on my desk

If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.

I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.

I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.

SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."

Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"

SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"

Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.

SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."

We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"

SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."

Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."

He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.

So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.

You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.

A common scenario strikes again today:

- Blocked on a problem at the end of the day
- Tell my wife I'm headed home
- Inspiration strikes
- time flies by coding in the zone
- realize I'm super late
- run out the door like a crazy person

What the fuck!!!!!

Never thought I'd have to rant so soon joining my new org.

Guess the honeymoon phase is over earlier than I anticipated.

1. This company is awesome and employee friendly. They made me kickass deal which I couldn't refuse. However, upon checking glassdoor, I realised they still managed to low ball me. Lol.

But I have no complaints and I am pretty happy with whatever they are offering as of now. My next point is the primary reason I disabled my app blocker to rant out.

2. A junior is leaving and so is my lead. Damn! Fuckkkkkk!!! My lead is super awesome. There's so much dependent on her.

Entire organisation is watching the product line she and I am working on. It's the heart of the entire product.

It's just been a month I joined and so much responsibility on me already. Well, I am not fearing that.

What I am afraid of and rather uncomfortable with is that they are going to hire someone else in a different time zone who'll lead this entire thing and they might map me under that new person who'll be a senior level executive.

Fuck that shit. I don't want to leave my current manager for she is awesome too. With departure of my lead, it's just me and my manager that are left in the team.

I am not sure what the future will be but I know that there are lot of learnings coming my way.

One thing I wish for is that they relocate me for short or mid term to UK or EU. Then a lot of things will be solved for me.

For now, I am just keeping my head low and doing what best I can, which is focusing on work.

Hope they promote me with an amazing salary hike.

Atleast somebody is keeping their site up to date #4/20day
(IST time Zone)

Good morning everyone (atleast for my Time Zone), god bless you all !

been following my morning silly brain for 3 hours to write an 8086 assembler CPU and RAM emulator. after 1 hour of debugging, time to polish it and refactoring.

My country just changed its time zone from UTC+3 to UTC+2.
Now I have to change the server to handle requests correctly!
PS. Probably tomorrow will be a big chaos for everyone!

oh man... I just spent 12 hours in the zone and made what was originally meant to be made by 4 developers in close to two weeks(coding in free time)

Aaand I also drank too much coffee...

And I've done it in Node.js which I basically never used before :D ...I applied my coding standards and habits that I use when writing Java and it went like butter... ES2015 is pretty ok actually 😊

Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.

It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.

Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.

This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.

Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.

I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)

Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.

By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.

Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.

Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.

It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.

I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.

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

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

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

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

dafuq, hell yeah i think?!

Just got a call about a site I made fo someone being down. It's 3am on a Monday morning. I have school in 6 hours. My client knows this. Go fuck yourself I'm not getting out of bed at 3 in the morning.

Note: we live in the same time zone.

I just got memo/warning for swearing too much.

Should i submit my resignation now?

Just to be clear, im not swearing AT someone. You guys know how it is when we're in the zone. Headphones on, focus intensifies, errors encountered, a lot of shits and fucks are uttered, most of the time shouted.

First rant: but I'm so triggered and everyone needs a break from all the EU and PC rants.

It's time to defend JavaScript. That's right, the best frikin language in the universe.

Features:
incredible async code (await/async)
universal support on almost everything connected to the internet
runs on almost all platforms including natively
dynamically interpreted but also internally compiled (like Perl)
gave birth to JSON (you're welcome ppl who remember that the X in AJAX stood for XML)

All these people ranting about JS don't understand that JS isn't frikin magic. It does what it needs to do well.

If you're using it for compute-heavy machine learning, or to maintain a 100k LOC project without Typescript, then why'd you shoot yourself in the foot?

As a proud JS developer I gotta scroll through all these posts gushing over the other languages. Why does nobody rant about using Python for bitcoin mining or Erlang to create a media player?

Cuz if you use the wrong tool for the right job, it's of course gonna blow up in your face.

For example, there was a post claiming JS developers were "scared" of multithreading and only stick in their comfort zone. Like WTF when NodeJS came out everything was multithreaded. It took some brave developers to step out of the comfort zone to embrace the event loop.

For a web app, things like PHP and Node should only be doing light transforms between the database information and HTML anyways. You get one thread to handle the server because you're keeping other threads open to interface with databases and the filesystem. The Nexus.js dev ranting on all us JS devs and doesn't realize that nobody's actual web server is CPU bound because of writing HTML bodies, thats why we only use 1 thread. We use other worker threads to do the heavy lifting (yes there is a C++ bridge look it up)

Anyways TL;DR plz respect JS developers we're people too. ES7 is magic and please don't shit on ES3 or we'll start shitting on the Python 2-3 conversion (need to maintain an outdated binary just cuz people leave out ()'s in their print statements)

Or at least agree that VB.NET is an abomination and insult to the beauty that is TI-84 BASIC

Time flies, one minute you're starting a project at 11PM and finally​ ready to sleep...at 5.45AM

You know that feeling when you're "on the zone"

I am tired of toxic politics at work.

Signs of a toxic workplace:

* (good) decisions are discouraged rather than encouraged.
Someone wants to introduce a great optimization and guess what the reply is (often from someone IT-ignorant): wait a minute, you can't do that because we have all these nifty little hacks and if you dare to suggest change to our shitty system, we could not allow that! We want to stay in our comfy zone, no no!

* no one can make a decision unless Mr. favorite-developer-everyone-likes says it's a good idea. And even if he's wrong, no one cares to listen to anyone else's idea on it. Stupid Feudalism. One man decides over the entire codebase. That's just idiocy. Where's TEAM in there?

* thinking years of experience equals intellectual capacity. It certainly does not! There are senior developers with 15 years of experience who don't even know how to open commandline, or they didn't even know about Chrome developer tools, or how the HTTP spec is built. That shit just makes me cry inside. How can you give these peoples the title of senior when they know less than a freshman year kid?!

* ignoring people's education and/or capacities. "You just graduated, so you're a noob". Right, I know more than you, you idiot. You've demonstrated your ignorance often enough. Stupid ignorant colleagues.

* blaming politics (every team blames the other team and there's constant tension)

* roaming ignorance (no one in the company, and I mean no one, besides me, knows enough about Information Technology to make competent decisions or analysis)

Politics:
What gives testers the idea that they know more than other members of the team? Why do they treat devs like they are mentally challenged?
What gives PO's that same idea?
What gives managers the idea that they can just yell at developers and threaten them with time pressure? Yeah, because the customers are breathing down their neck.

Just because I am a Junior Developer, that makes me stupid? I am tired of no one caring to listen to my ideas. I could save the company at the snap of a finger but everyone ignores my opinion (and often facts) on things.
People come in and instead of asking me for help, they ask everyone else for help, including the people who don't know shit about IT; now that's insulting.

Anyway, toxic politics.

When you skip breakfast because you're running late, forget to go to lunch because you're in the zone, go home, work on your latest personal project and now it's 10 pm and you realize you have nothing to eat at home, so you have to rush half across town to the only supermarket that's still open...

1. Being the only single wringable neck to keep 40+ websites afloat, plus 3-5 new ones coming in or being built each month all with an overseas team that uses Google Translate to communicate and who are also in an active war zone.
2. Being fired for being “too old” in my mindset about how to do things. I had just turned 40 and my boss was 24 and distracted by all the shiny frameworks when all the marketing person needed was a simple off-the-shelf CMS-based site to publish company offers.
3. Jumping into the middle of a HUGE clusterfuck of thousands of Slack channels, wikis, and Jiras and an outmoded content management system while trying to learn the ropes from a guy who has no time to teach properly and then who abruptly leaves the company with scant documentation on everything that he held mainly in his own head. And there was no way I.T. was going to allow him to have the ability in Zoom to make a video of his training sessions, for no discernibly good security reason at all.
4. Working for only 9 months at two separate companies for two separate frat dudes who could have been clones of each other and whose egos made them into seagull managers* in every sense.
5. Being told by a new employer that they’re hiring me to be the head of their new web team only to find myself shuttled off to obscure contractor roles at MegaCorp Inc and AcmeCorp Inc.

I have 17 more years of this shit ahead of me before I can retire.

*If you haven’t heard of this: Someone who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits all over everything, and flies out leaving everyone else to clean up the mess.

Got the ideal job right now. Over market salary. 100% remote. Mornings to myself until the rest of the team in another time zone comes online. Working within my competency with just enough challenge to make it interesting. Free products for being an employee. Only wish it came with paid health insurance but I do get a partial reimbursement.

I worked for months staying up till 3am almost every night in order to collaborate with a team on another time zone. No one ever praised me or thanked me or gave me a pat.

Yesterday two members of that team stayed up till 2am once for the first time in their lives to make a release. They got immediately labelled as the most dedicated employees.

Okay, sounds fair.

Once I strongly hissed at my boss from that time in a "stop now or I start yelling" voice.
We had an emergency and I was already working late to fix it. 8pm, only the both of us were still in the office. I was in the zone, still searching for the source of the problem and he kept coming in every 2-5 minutes offering his help, ripping every shred of concentration right off my skull, but he had absolutely no relevant technical skills, experience or information. There was nothing he could do.
In the end I hissed at him "Get your fucking ass out of here and let me do my job. This piece of shit kills my day and there is nothing you can do besides to say 'go home'."
Then he finally let me do my job.

GOD FUCKING DAMMIT MICROSOFT IT'S NOT THAT FUCKING HARD TO REMEMBER WHAT TIME ZONE I SET

bladder: I got to pee.
me: NO! To deep in code zone.

[20 mins pass]
bladder: I got to pee.
me: NO! Let me finish this.

[30 mins pass]
bladder: I'VE GOT TO PEE
me: NO! In a zone.

[5 mins pass]
bladder: GO! GO! GO!
me: D**n you bladder.

I hate this game. I lose every time.

A misconception that software engineers just sit in front of their laptops and code 40 hours a week, with no social interaction.

A software engineer’s job is actually pretty social. Personally, I probably spend around half of my time interacting with people. This could be partially due to 1:1, team, and other meetings. But a large part of it is spent in bouncing off ideas about your project with your project mates (especially during the planning phase), chiming in the conversations about some recent or urgent problems to help find or propose solutions, answering others’ questions, organizing some events, etc.

Of course, I do need some dedicated uninterrupted time to focus on programming and to get into the zone, but it’s certainly not the only activity I do at work. The main point to understand is that the software engineering is not a solitary, but a social job.

Overall, I’m very happy with my profession. The enjoyment I get out of my work vastly outweighs all of these points combined.

I love to work in pubs/bars, this special kind of noisy environment works so well for me. I even go "into the zone".

Lets talk about this. Is anyone else the same? Just curious.

These are my 6 reasons:

0) Beer. 🍺
1) None of the activity in a bar actually interests to me, if you know what I mean. In my house, every single noise/movement will get my attention.
2) After some time all the noise blends into a kind of "homogeneous hearing blurb". Like a mantra. Maybe there are even white/pink/brown noise benefits (guess).
3) I go to places where I enjoy the music and atmosphere.
4) I like bars and pubs anyways. I feel good in these places.
5) Beer. 🍺

Rant!

When I'm in my "zone" working please for the love of god don't stand behind me staring at me and my screen, every time you do that you make me feel that my privacy is being raped and I can't do anything about it !!

-= Me in the zone hacking out code during meeting with customer for an emergency change =-

-ready to deploy just need to....-

Me to myself:

"Oh ... oh shit ... I forgot who the customer is / who this is for / what time it is ... how do I ask these people on the call who the fuck they even are....?"

(｀_´)ゞ

So I was using Coffee Meet Bagel to talk to a girl who is currently travelling. We noticed that the messages were sorted out of orders with incorrect time due to the different time zone we are in.

So naturally, I sent them a big report.

Their support team replied by telling me to do the usual. Restart, update, reinstall, delete everything etc (it’s their default answer!!).

I told them I have done those.

They then rephrased my bug report and told me this is expected as the chat was between two parties with a different time so the messages are sorted out of order due to the time difference.

I guess most developer will get ticked off by that... so I sent them a few pseudo code on how chat across different time zones should have been dealt with...

Life of a developer. Debugging and coding even when on a dating app... 🤷🏽‍♂️

I love beer. I like trying things out of my comfort zone. German and Belgian beers are absolutely delish, them mfkers know how to make a good brew. I also like my Japanese and Mexican beers, and even though europeans shit on them all the time, there are tons of American brands I love.

But......for the life of me.....every IPA I take tastes like fucking dishwater soap. From artisanal to regular market brands, everything in between. Fuck me man I can't stand the taste.

Anyone feels the same?

So I'm on vacation right now to visit family. I received an email from the head of department that, due to our department getting 7 new hires in one day, the seating arrangement has been changed.

My new seat is next to this one developer who's old enough to be my dad. He's a very nice guy and all, but the problem is he burps ALL. THE. TIME. I've never met anybody more gassy. His burps don't stink, thank God, but they're loud enough that it's seriously jarring.

You know how us devs can be completely in the zone until some marketing dickbag taps you on the shoulder and asks you to check your email or help with something that is absolutely not your job and you completely lose all focus and have to start over? Its exactly like that, except it happens every 10 minutes.

Another thing is, my back is now facing away from the wall, towards the rest of the office. The nearest section to mine is management. That means that anybody, including the CEO, can walk up right behind me and see what I'm doing at all times.

I really hate that. Id much rather be next to the wall to have some sort of privacy. Somehow sitting next to burpy guy is still the thing I'm most annoyed about though.

I tried to ask for a different seat, but my manager effectively said that I have no choice but to sit there because that guy is part of my team, and teammates should sit together. He forgot about the fact that, while the work him and I do is indeed related, I've been working on a solo project for the past few months and I don't need to be next to anybody in particular because I'm the only one working on this thing. Theoretically, I could sit in the toilet with my laptop and get my work done just fine. Maybe when I talk to him face to face in the office I can convince him to have some mercy on me.

The bright side is I'm very excited about meeting those 7 new hires I mentioned. They seem to be smart, capable people so I look forward to working with them and learning from them. Every cloud has a silver lining. 😊

Storytime!

I got a ticket near the end of the day, asking to install a printer on a computer. The branch in question was in a different time zone (I'm in US-Pacific [GMT-07] and the computer was in US-Eastern [GMT-04]). I figured I wouldn't worry about it; after all, I had other tickets to work on that were much higher priority.

The next day I come into work and immediately get a message from one of my East Coast coworkers, telling me that this branch is calling and asking how the printer is coming. I told him to tell them I would call them a bit later. I do a couple of easy jobs and then begrudgingly call the branch. I listen to the phone tree that they have (which requires two button presses instead of one in order to speak with someone) and finally get in contact with a person... only to have the call disconnect.

I call back and ask for the person who called in the ticket and then followed up, who had apparently gone to lunch. I informed the person that I was just going to install the printer and it would be good to go. This would be fine... up until she mentioned she needed scanning functionality.

Now I wasn't sure if the driver we have in AD is set up with the scan functionality, so I said okay, but that meant I would have to get the driver from the website. The connection to our branches are about 1Mbps, so even downloading Java updates (60-ish MB) take about 5-10 minutes on a good day. The file for this printer was about 700MB (thanks HP). So I went and did other stuff while that downloaded.

I come back after it finished and started the install process. Right away it asks to re-seat the USB cable. So I call the branch. The call disconnects. I call again. It disconnects. I call one more time, and finally get the person who called the ticket in. I instruct him to re-seat the cable. He does. The driver starts doing its thing. I tell him I'll call back if I run into any issues and we hang up.

The driver goes through the install process for about 20 minutes, stops at 99%, then fails. I want to restart the computer, just in case there's a conflict somewhere, but that would require calling the store again, so I put it off.

About an hour later I get a message from another East Coast coworker, telling me the branch is calling about the printer again. I was in the middle of another call and said I would call back later. I do. It disconnects. I call again, and get the person who called the ticket in again. I tell him I want to restart the computer, but wasn't sure if it was okay. He checks with the people using it, who says it's okay, so I reboot. I hang up.

Once the computer comes back up I start the install process again. It asks to re-seat the cable. Fuck. I don't want to call the store again, so I open notepad and say "Please take out the printer's USB connection from the back of the computer."

Three. Fucking. People. Saw it. They moved the window and one even tried to close it, but they didn't re-seat the cable. I opened another window, telling them to call me at my number. They didn't. I called them. Got disconnected. I called them again, finally got someone, told them to re-seat the printer cable again. They do, thank god.

I say thank you and hang up. Continue the installer. It stops at 99% again and fails. I reboot the computer; screw it, I'm just going to install the driver from Active Directory. Check Devices and Printers. It's installed successfully. Hallelujah!

I get the printer set up for the various programs they use and print a test page. I call them one last time; their phone system sounding like they were connected via an underwater line connected by tin cans. I get someone.

$me: Hi, I want to know if the printer has printed something.

$them (garbled): -et me shee... yesh, it -rint-d a *beezelborp*.

$me: Perfect, I'm going to close this ticket! Thanks, goodbye! *hangs up*

tl;dr - I hate printers

need to schedule a call with a guy from another branch at work. i tell him that because of the time zone shift, i can do earliest around noon his time (and that's being generous, thats really early for a dev my time)

and of course, what does he turn around and do? sends me a meeting for 3 AM...

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

i can't be the one with mental illness right?

perhaps the thing to do is just go around being so fucking ignorant you're just blissfully happy at all times

What's the point in having a relaxation/fun/chill zone/room in your company when you never have the time to use it except maybe on your lunch break? 🤔🤔

Does anyone else feel you have to do the coding part of development outside of office hours, because the interruptions + even anxiety of being interrupted prevents you from getting into the zone? If I have free time at the weekend I can get into work coding and it's great - I'm so productive - isn't this how work would want me to be 5 days a week? And yet, somehow, the work environment doesn't allow it.

Prior to a tech conference in Las Vegas, the department manager held pre-meetings (yes, more than one)
with the developers to outline their expected behavior (yes, there was an outline in Word). Since
they would be representing the company, professionalism would be expected at all times, not just
during the conference. He knew he couldn’t forbid gambling and drinking, but any unruly behavior
that could reflect badly on the company would be dealt with severe disciplinary action up to and
including termination. He wrote up very detailed itinerary, what track each developer was
expected to attend, meal times (yes, what time to get up for breakfast, meet for lunch, and time
to eat at night). First day was fine, casinos are kinda crazy so having an itinerary wasn’t the
worst idea and no one got lost. Days following however, got interesting. After the first evening
meal, everyone hit the casino as expected (too much drinking, etc..normal single twenty-something
guys do) and the manager especially had a good time.
Next, and following days, the manager could not be found in any of the ‘required’ technical tracks.
Not that they cared that much, but couple of devs decided to check out the casino, and sure enough,
there he was at one of the tables, drunk, and being very loud around at 10 in the morning.
Again, nobody cared much, manager wasn’t very tech savy, and so attending a track on C #threading
would be lost on him. It was more of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ kind of thing.
The manager kept to the itinerary, he met everyone at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, etc, but the
‘WTF’s didn’t get good until the manager was bragging about how wonderful the conference was, how
much he was learning and couldn’t wait to get back and start implementing everything he was learning.
It was such a joke, the guys would bait him on tracks they know he didn’t attend and an amazing amount
of BS could not be believed.
On the last day of the conference several decided to follow him after breakfast to see where he went
and watched him go into a technical track, just to walk back out and straight to the casino floor.
Again, around 10, he was drunk, not quite as loud until he threw up in a trash can (they said it was quite a scene).
He left to go back his room, which they suspected he took a nap before meeting everyone for lunch.
After that, they gathered his daily itinerary was:
- Get up for breakfast
- walk around and make sure it looked like he was heading to a track
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat lunch
- walk around some more
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat dinner
- head to the casino
- wash-rinse-repeat
Last day caught up with him. After about week of drinking, staying up late, etc, his body (he’s in his mid 50’s, 350lbs+, so imagine)
kinda’ gave up. Could barely walk 50 feet without needing to sit down, and the flight back was worse for everyone,
throwing up occasionally, moaning, you get the idea.
On the following Monday with the VP if IT, everyone was discussing the conference, what they learned,
what they liked, etc, the manager also bragged, yes bragged, on how tired he was because of how much
he learned and the reason why he probably caught the flu (he couldn’t hide how sick he was on the flight)
saying “When you’re in the learning zone, you lose track of time and then you are so exhausted, your
immune system is susceptible to all kinds of things.” . VP was so impressed by his dedication and
fighting through the exhaustion for the good of the company, he gave him the rest of the day off.
Other devs? No, they had to go back to work.

Data Disinformation: the Next Big Problem

Automatic code generation LLMs like ChatGPT are capable of producing SQL snippets. Regardless of quality, those are capable of retrieving data (from prepared datasets) based on user prompts.
That data may, however, be garbage. This will lead to garbage decisions by lowly literate stakeholders.
Like with network neutrality and pii/psi ownership, we must act now to avoid yet another calamity.

Imagine a scenario where a middle-manager level illiterate barks some prompts to the corporate AI and it writes and runs an SQL query in company databases.
The AI outputs some interactive charts that show that the average worker spends 92.4 minutes on lunch daily.
The middle manager gets furious and enacts an Orwellian policy of facial recognition punch clock in the office.
Two months and millions of dollars in contractors later, and the middle manager checks the same prompt again... and the average lunch time is now 107.2 minutes!
Finally the middle manager gets a literate person to check the data... and the piece of shit SQL behind the number is sourcing from the "off-site scheduled meetings" database.
Why? because the dataset that does have the data for lunch breaks is labeled "labour board compliance 3", and the LLM thought that the metadata for the wrong dataset better matched the user's prompt.

This, given the very real world scenario of mislabeled data and LLMs' inability to understand what they are saying or accessing, and the average manager's complete data illiteracy, we might have to wrangle some actions to prepare for this type of tomfoolery.

I don't think that access restriction will save our souls here, decision-flumberers usually have the authority to overrule RACI/ACL restrictions anyway.
Making "data analysis" an AI-GMO-Free zone is laughable, that is simply not how the tech market works. Auto tools are coming to make our jobs harder and less productive, tech people!
I thought about detecting new automation-enhanced data access and visualization, and enacting awareness policies. But it would be of poor help, after a shithead middle manager gets hooked on a surreal indicator value it is nigh impossible to yank them out of it.

Gotta get this snowball rolling, we must have some idea of future AI housetraining best practices if we are to avoid a complete social-media style meltdown of data-driven processes.
Someone cares to pitch in?

I am great at getting raspberry pi projects about 97% done...

But absolute shit at that last 3%.

Working on a home built WiFi repeater and deauther (front) and a 1TB SSD nextcloudpi server (back). Definitely outside my comfort zone, especially the first one. Despite having mad time on terminal, and SSH every day, I am very soft on this networking shit.

wpa_supplicant, though I do not now, I will come to understand your mysteries.

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

I'm going to be that guy .... A lot of these rants are about code compiling first time .. Throwing away code you wrote because you didn't need it... Getting in the zone and writing a billion lines before you compile .... Am I the only freaking person here that does TDD ? My rant is wake up people ! People evangelize about it because it fucking works !

I sincerely cannot live through another daylight saving time change. I cannot. Please, oh politicans, have mercy upon me. My work deals with 5 different time zones. PLEASE

GMT/UTC
IST
ACST
CST
PST
.
.
.
.
.
Man Fuck time zones, I don't even know where I belong anymore while keeping track of all of them at once.
Fuck You In The Ass Time Zone

It's Monday and I didn't feel very good last weekends. Time to go into zone and code. Any poor soul who decided to buzz me shall be ignored.

Sorry Google, you got it wrong this time ....

Oh my gosh, look at that function definition ...
Oh my gosh, look at that variable ...
Oh my gosh, look at that zone ...
Oh my gosh, look at that long ...
Oh my gosh, look at that short ...
Oh my gosh, look at that stop ... is more my style.

Fucking corporate bullshit, I was coding (mostly creating bugs and pulling my hair off) all night on my free time (I'm on night shifts I keep the schedule when I have my days off) and at the moment I was making huge progress on my project, I gotta go to sleep to go back to work 4h later to follow a fucking 2h training on team efficiency and cohesion, in other words, how to waste 2h in a useless meeting and not getting it back + interrupting the only night I was in the zone, I'm so tired of this....

Argh, time to drop out of the zone to go stuff calories in my face again. Just hook me up to an IV already and let me make cool shit!

Ps @dfox it'd be cool if we could take a picture to post straight from app.

In the zone coding... oh what's this? A text from the wife? Apparently now's the time to resolve last night's fight.

Fucking government shifting day light saving time by two weeks making me rely on my phone time zone auto-update and wake up one fucking hour earlier!

Way to go Monday...

Funny thing the brain is.

TL;DR; being in the zone is nice. But there is another level of it and, fuck it, I'm loving it!!!

level 0: phased-out, relaxed state. Not focused on anything in particular. Just going with the flow

level 1: aware of the situation and of what's going on, not engaging too much

level 2: alert, ready to react. Constant concentration

level 3: THE ZONE. Time continuum is broken by concentration on the task in front of you - while working on it, time passes faster by magnitudes than when you're in any lower level. Surroundings and periphery do not exist. On;y the task currently in hand exists. Restroom breaks can wait.

level 4: body works on the task by itself. Any cognitive engagement with any of it will only make matters worse. The body knows it better, just let it do the work - let your consciousness sit back and relax, think about something nice. It's a sort of biological version of DMA (direct memory access), bypassing the CPU.

I've only reached level 4 several times, briefly and only while playing BeatSaber. The boxes are flying at me and hands just hit 'em the right way by themselves. Only after the hit, do I realise what my hands did and how cool it actually is. If I try to intentionally look at the boxed and aim for them, I mess it all up. And it's not like muscle memory - level 4 copes with any non-Camellia Expert level, regardless of whether have I played it in the past many times or just a few, several months ago.

I love that feeling!

I get this compliment when I just started to learn C# and wrote a class to convert DB time zone on azure windows and Linux app services.

“Wow, didn’t know you can convert nullable datetimeoffset this way, I’m going to use this class in rest of our Projects. “

It really boost my mood for weeks.

To get into the zone I need 5 minutes to focus, think and lay out a plan. Need a clear schedule the next 4 hours, minimum. Clean desk, headset on, water refilled and a fresh coffee. Away we go.

10 minutes later someone taps me on my shoulder .. fuck!! Every damn time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I work on many projects at work. There's divisions of teams and each team typically has one project. Each one of those projects have weekly Sprint meetings.

That's great! For the team. That means each team has one meeting a week so it's not too disruptive for those individuals.

Me on the other hand? I've got my hand in all the buckets. I'm on every team. I'm the only person on every team. This means I get to go to every meeting.

Let me rephrase that:
This means I -have- to go to every. Single. Meeting.

Which means I have a meeting every. Single. Day. Even if I didn't touch that project that week.

It is literally THE biggest waste of time. I sit there in a 1-2 hour long meeting saying absolutely nothing, not even being spoken to. I could be working on other projects.

And these meetings normally interrupt something I'm working on. Conveniently in the middle of me being in my zone. It makes me completely un-motivated to work for the hour before the meeting because why bother if I'm just going to get interrupted? And then it takes an hour to get back into everything after the meeting because everyone is fooling around or complaining about the meeting.

So that's three hours of my 8 hour work day completely wasted.

At home: a glass of nice single malt whiskey, headphones on with some chill background music and that's all I need.

At work: First half an hour up to one hours goes into deciding what to do / waking up and having the first 2-4 cups of coffee.

Headphones on with some chill background music and I get into the zone for a quick moment before it's lunch time and it takes up to 1h after the lunch break to get back to the zone and multiple coffee cups.

In the afternoon I usually get into the zone and real speed with my work and quite often almost forget to go home :/

time zone shift.

Am I the only one whos's inner clock seems to go absolutely crazy...

Might be due to my health issues, but whenever these one hour time shifts happen - trouble sleeping starts again, feeling sluggish and blue and nothing seems to work.

I hope it doesn't take long to readjust, cause today was completely unproductive

A dev life in Queen songs:

„A Kind of Magic“ - Build successful
„A Winter’s Tale“ - Key Account Manager visits customer
„Action This Day“ - Release day
„All Dead, All Dead“ - System down
„Another One Bites the Dust“ - kill -9 4711
„Breakthru“ - 10 hour debuging session
„Chinese Torture“ - Microsft Office
„Coming Soon“ - Client asks for delivery date
„Dead on Time“ - shutdown -t 10
„Doing All Right“ - How's the progress on the new feature?
„Don’t Lose Your Head“ - git push -f
„Don’t Stop Me Now“ - In the zone
„Escape from the Swamp“ - Hand in resignation letter
„Forever“ - while(1)
„Friends Will Be Friends“ - friend class Vector;
„Get Down, Make Love“ - No rule to make target "Love"
„Hammer to Fall“ - Release day
„Hang on in There“ - 2 weeks until release
„I Can’t Live With You“- Microsoft
„I Go Crazy“ - Microsoft
„I Want It All“ - Google
„I Want to Break Free“ - free( (void*) 0xDEADBEEF );
„I’m Going Slightly Mad“ - Impossible feature requested
„If You Can’t Beat Them“ - Impossible feature promised by sales
„In Only Seven Days“ - Impossible feature ordered
„Is This the World We Created...?“ - Philosphic moments
„It’s a Beautiful Day“ - Weekend
„It’s a Hard Life“ - Weekday
„It’s Late“ - Deadline was last week
„Jesus“ - WTF?
„Keep Passing the Open Windows“ - Interprocess communication
„Keep Yourself Alive“ - Daily struggle
„Leaving Home Ain’t Easy“ - Time to get up and go to work
„Let Me Entertain You“ - Sales meets customer
„Liar“ - Sales
„Long Away“ - Project start
„Loser in the End“ - Dev
„Lost Opportunity“ - Job ad
„Love of My Life“ - emacs/vim
„Machines“ - Computer
„Made in Heaven“ - git
„Misfire“ - Unhandled exception at Memory location 0xDEADBEEF
„My Life Has Been Saved“ - Google drive/Facebook
„New York, New York“ - Meeting at customer
„No-One But You“ - Bus factor = 1
„Now I’m Here“ - Morning rush hour
„One Vision“ - Management goals
„Pain Is So Close to Pleasure“ - NullPointerExcption
„Party“ - Delivery completed
„Play the Game“ - Customer meeting inhous -
„Put Out the Fire“ - Support hotline
„Radio Ga Ga“ - GSM/GPRS/UMTS/LTE/5G
„Ride the Wild Wind“ - Arch Linux
„Rock It“ - Linux
„Save Me“ - CTRL-S/CTRL-Z
„See What a Fool I’ve Been“ - git blame
„Sheer Heart Attack“ - rm -rf /
„Staying Power“- UPS
„Stealin’“ - Stack Overflow
„The Miracle“ - It works
„The Night Comes Down“ - It doesn't work
„The Show Must Go On“ - Project cancelled
„There Must Be More to Life Than This“ - Philosophic moments
„These Are the Days of Our Lives“ - Daily routine
„Under Pressure“ - 1 day until release
„Was It All Worth It“ - Controlling
„We Are the Champions“ - Release finished
„We Will Rock You“ - Sales at customer
„Who Needs You“ - HR
„You Don’t Fool Me“ - Debugging session
„You Take My Breath Away“ - rm -rf /
„You’re My Best Friend“ - emacs/vim

A little reflection on the relationship between me/my dad/computer:

When i was younger my dad showed and taught me how to work on his (10 - 15yrs+ old) laptop running windows xp. Soon we got a simple desktop pc (those ones that took nearly a minute to start). i remember my dad sayin something like "don't download anything cause (the pc will brake/it will be a virus/...)", I don't remember exactly ... but i know that i still did it (being fucking nervous😅) and it went well😌. later me and my little sister would go to "spielaffe.de" several times until getting some kind of "virus"😅😅.
Time passed and i got passionate about pc's (programming, trying Ubuntu, reading about internals of a pc,...). It didn't take long that i passed my dad's knowledge and so here i am studying CS😎.
In the end, regarding my dad:
first he was the master i looked up to, then he became the buddy i talked to and asked for problems, then ... he remained the light user who would like to return to his windows xp era and asks me first as his personal google when something happens out of his "comfort-zone"😅😌.
And sometimes i believe my dad is becoming incompetent for pc's😂😅

Definitely Jon Skeet. Not only is he #1 on stackoverflow. He is actively tackling the hardest problem of them all: Time zone.

Closely followed by Joel Spolsky. The founder of stack overflow. Feels like all his products (fogcreek, trello) revolutionizes developer productivity and addresses actual pain points

I swear to god, the next time someone brings in sh*t to a meeting again that's totally off-topic, I'll grab a nerf gun and turn this place into a f*cking war zone!

I don't feel ready to search for jobs. I don't feel that coding is for me.

There is this guy that wanted to study physics and changed to System Information. He is more logical and rational than me. I'm too "emotional" to code, I get stressed easily when something isn't working.

I'm doing this because I wanted to challenge and prove myself that I could be more. I could have been a teacher, but I thought that it wasn't enough for me and I wanted to go further.

Every day I'm outside of my comfort zone and I don't know where this path will lead me and I'm scared and at the same time, I'm hoping for a happy end.

Maybe my brain is not made for coding, maybe it is more on the database side. But I'm sure of one thing: this year I'll give my best and everything at my current internship to get better at coding with Android Studio, Windows Form, Angular and React. My results will determine if I''m a good fit for coding.

Remember one thing: not everyone can easily learn how to code, but you will never know if you don't try it. Go out of your comfort zone in your life and you will meet a whole new world.

I remember I couldn't compile a clean Xamarin Forms project on Visual Studio because of a System.TimeZoneInfoNotFoundException. The workaround?, changed my time zone to Central time USA-Canada. So apparently it is not allowed to use Xamarin in the third world...

Cross time-zone design reviews are brutal! Feeling super exhausted, explaining shit I designed feels like torture! I mean, just get it!

For the one I currently have. Spent about 2 weeks looking to get as much of my PHP skillset in the right place since I knew PHP was their main technology as well as JS, C# and VB.NET, we seldom use them tbh, and it is mostly extension or maintenance stuff, so I focused on PHP.

I was not panicking, I rarely ever do, but my body tends to disagree with my state of mind and I can feel myself trembling in certain situations, such as the interview.

The interview was on Monday and my last day of preparation was Sunday (obviously) so what I did was drank a lot of beer and played videogames, I just wanted to take my mind off things. I was, and have always been annoyingly confident in myself and could not understand why I was feeling so nervous internally.

Everything went away when the manager came to greet me, lovely looking gal with an awesome sense of style and a big smile, we clicked instantly and to this day the place is kinda like my second home, as hectic as it is to work in an institution of this size it is really my peace and quiet zone. The entire I.T department is a big family, before the pandemic we would go to bbqs together all the time, would go to a friend's ranch to shoot shit and just chill, parties and gatherings, it really is a nice place to be at and they take the "we are family" very fucking seriously, I fucking love it. The boss lady ain't here no more, but she recommended me for the position and well, here I am.

I severely hope everyone here finds the same kind of place, there are a lot of assholes in this industry and a lot of places that seem very into the idea of making you absolutely miserable with no chance of leveling up, I know because all other jobs previous to this place was the same way for me.

Have faith, keep them chins up, and don't ever fucking let anyone make you think you are something you are not. You glorious beautiful basterds!

our team are responsible to build backend restful API for other team to look up data in DB.
the consumer team just sit beside us.
the interface definition came from our pm in a different time zone. btw he did not have any programming background.
and he insisted that just build what he said and ignore the noise from the consumer team. because each interface change should be considered as new features and need him to prioritize and create user story and he will review the schema with the pm from consumer team and so called architecture who did not coding real shit for years.
we ended up with building shit code not useable by our real consumer.
yes he do manage to keep our team busy building worthless shit and accomplishmented lots of jira items to show we have value to change a useless shit into very hard to use shit

I lose all respect for people trying to schedule meetings with me when they write the time zone initialism incorrectly.

It is well into EDT. EST technically means you want to meet an hour earlier and that you live in a different time zone than everyone else on the east coast of the United States. But I'm just going to assume that you don't remember that really annoying daylight savings time shit we have to do twice a year and show up in EDT.

semi dev related(later half)
A common and random thought I have:

A lot of units that humans use are either needlessly arbitrary or based on something weird. Like Fahrenheit. That shit is weird! 0°F is the freezing point of a water and salt solution. What a weird fucking thing to use!

But also, I like Fahrenheit more. Probably because it's what I was raised with and switching is tedious (though I'm trying. I'd like to use metric more), but also because one degree F is a smaller, more precise change. You can describe more accuracy without decimals.

On the other hand I prefer metric for length. Centimeters, and centimeters are way more precise and way less confusing than inches and .... 1/8th inches? Who the fuck decided on 1/8ths?!

Which brings me to my common thought:

If you look at a Unix timestamp, you can approximate somewhat when it happened. Knowing the current timestamp and a few reference points you can see RELATIVELY what a epoch stamp translates to. A few days ago, an hr ago, 2014ish.

This leads me to think that if we actually taught from a young age to think in epoch as a unit (not as a replacement to normal date formats but as a secondary at first) that we could just naturally read epoch time in the same manner we read dates like "28/01/2006 14:24:10 UTC"

In your brain you automatically know how old you were when that timestamp happened. What grade/job and where you lived at the time. What season it was. You know how far into the day it was, a little before lunch (or after or whatever, your time zone will vary). Now try with 1138458250. I can usually get roughly the year, and month if I really think about it, but that's it. And it takes much more effort

I'm sure there's other units we could benefit from but epoch is the one that usually brings this to mind for me.

Without a break this would probably be around 4 hours. After that I just loose all productivity. So there so is really no point in forcing it any further.

For working without sleep I have regular done stretches as long as 32 hours. With just breaks for food and a quick walk around. To keep my body awake.

Why you probably ask yourself, well this has several reasons. For me to get in the "zone" I have to be awake for at least 12 hours. I'm not sure why this is, but the combination of being too tired to get distracted and the increase in dopamine from sleep deprivation. Is I think what makes for this, or by now it might just be a placebo. But well it works for me.

So when a deadline gets near and I'm not going to be able to make it, which used to happen a lot because I used to have a lot of migraines. I would start working in the morning, trying to get things done but not being to able to. Then after a full workday would take a dinner break and get back in the office, at this point I get in the zone and time flies by as I work through the night. Next morning people are coming back in the office and I start another workday.

I try to plan this so I have a lot of meetings or other social work. I get really social and chatty after being awake for more then 24 hours. Because my problem solving skills have really declined after being awake for so long.

Now when I still used to drink, I would after this workday get some dinner and go out to a bar to have drinks with friends. To celebrate me having made my deadline and well I'm really social from being awake so long. And I stop overthinking everything.

Still looking for a way to get in the zone before being awake for so long, so any tips are welcome!

Sitting in my beautiful chalet on this beautiful park. My garden nicely mowed. Sun in shining. Was in the zone the whole day. Now it's time to shift some gears and fetch some desperado's (will pass out after three probably, didn't drink for long time). Walk towards neighbor and drink together.

Life can be so beautiful

I hate night shifts. I now have insomnia and can't sleep now. But clients with night shifts have lots of money hmm I think I need to find morning clients. Same time zone as mine

I don't have to get in to the zone as I'm in the zone all the time. I sleep and dream code, eat code, actually write code, workout code...

When I say I'm a developer, it means that, in simpleton language, that I don't do your backups, I don't "repair" you PC because you're a baffon and I certainly do not edit company's logo which is in .png format deliver it in .cdr file and expect it as, as good and perfect as original, So fuck you, you impatient , imbecile , pompous prick I've ever met

> "Yeah take as much time as you want, but do it quickly"

I mean what the fuck does that even mean, if you want it done quickly then say so, be a man and face it and don't hide behind the excuse of "take as much time as you want"

Fucking idiots, little do they know when I'm in the zone I need time to think before act so I don't get blamed for "un-satisfied" product in the future.

So I've decided to leave loopholes in the current project I've been working on, deliver it, and leave the company and make their lives living hell, I know this is beneath anyone's standards but I have to do this to teach them how to treat a person properly,FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK,

This is going to be fun

Look, extra remote team member. If I hired you with the express requirement that you work and/or live in sync with my time zone, and you claim to live and work in my time zone for a few weeks but you're lying to me and you were actually just on vacation here and have moved back overseas, you SUCK. And now we're firmly entrenched with the project and it's near impossible to fire you at this point if I don't want to deal with a whole new developer and learning curve!!!

My dream! When I remind myself that I'm not where I want to be yet, I get in that ultimate coding-zone. I push myself to be better every time and that gets me coding and learning new things. And of course, red bull ;)

I was using SimpleDateFormat and everything was great but then next thing I find out, the time offset for GMT is stored as Z and not +00:00 which is the format I needed for API calls.

Every other time zone follows a similar format but yet somebody thought it was a good idea to switch it up for GMT

I’m working 2 jobs at the moment, putting 12+ hours/day, been doing for about 2 months and I’m already burned out;
I’m working for a big e-commerce agency which is about to get bigger, doing mostly outdated Frontend work (Magento) with no sign of raises/promotions/ real growth, since all clients are basically enterprise and only want “ol’ reliable” over innovative.
A lot of smart people, lot of knowledge, pay is fair.

The second job I’m doing (part-time) is for a smaller agency in the same sector, pay is a bit higher, closer time zone and an opportunity to work with newer technologies.

I need to make a decision on one of these two companies since I can’t possibly keep working all these hours.
Is there anything else I need to consider before making a decision?

As a Frontend developer I’m getting a bit tired of working with Magento and its outdated tools, but at the same time seems difficult to switch to something different since I haven’t really worked with anything else, I feel a little bit lost

Nothing much here, keep scrolling...

I think my manager does not like me. I might sound like a broken record because I keep asking feedback at the end of every call (which is every other day).

I genuinely want to make her proud of the decision to hire me and want to learn for which I am willing to work smarter/harder.

What I feel is that they find me annoying. They seem to be happy with my work but guess my Indian roots of typical behaviour are showing up.

My co-worker evidently isn't confident to lead on her own and keeps me looped in to all her tasks which I am fine with. Though, I feel that I might be overstepping in her zone and manager doesn't want me to do that.

I may not be perfect and also a very sensitive guy, but I am trying hard.

Maybe they have plans to get someone else to lead and just keep me as a pawn on the board.

I don't think it is the imposter syndrome this time and surely the teams in this org are working in silos with very little communication within or outside their direct teams which kind of makes it even more difficult for me to operate.

However, as always, I have enough free time in here to resume my side project, learn another hobby, or learn new skills. Or is it just that I am assigned less task or underperforming?

Sometimes things are very confusing and one can never find an answer.

What's the best thing to do in such a situation?

Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a problem — after his army service, he got so used to cold that he could only sleep on a raw, cold metal grill. Usually, normal people put mattress on top, but Erdogan didn’t feel right this way. So, in one of his personal prisons, he established a social project for making a full metal bed for himself.

For starters, to calculate the shape, he took the smallest man ever (3 inches high) with his fingers and sunk him into molten plastic. “What are you doing?! It hurts!” — man screamed. “Shut up. You’re on an important mission. Your motherland won’t forget you.”
After three months, the bed was ready. It was more of the same — metal bars, but this time with some kind of structure built of metal hinges, rebar and strong springs. This was the day — this was the big reveal event. It took place in the same prison — three prisoners were ready to lay on their new full metal beds, while news crews congratulated Erdogan and celebrated his greatness. “Well, it is time!” — he said.
Prisoners laid flat. An awful screeching sound. Prisoner number two is bleeding out. The spring mechanism broke out and impaled his chest onto a large metal bar. He’s not breathing.
“Shut it down. Shut it all down. No more cameras, no more news”, — said Erdogan.
“Yes, our master”, — said news crews.

They wanted to draft me to Afghanistan.
“No!”, — a young officer shouted, misgendering me — “He doesn’t know the stages of pain. Useless.”
“Are you perhaps arguing pain with a bipolar patient?” — I replied.
“You are a rave. Nothing but a rave.”

Raves spawned near your doors at night. Sometimes, they even spawned on the inside. I can’t say you were in danger, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant thing to happen to anyone. They looked ugly. They dressed weird. They spoke in riddles.
“How do I move to Europe?”, — a rave asked.
“I…”
“Shut up!”
Rave took a door, suspiciously painted over and over multiple times, and started to slam my door with it, using it as a ram.
My door started giving in.

Alarm system.
On a separate note, to disable the alarm system, you have to speedrun Stanley Parable. It’s the hardest speedrun ever, specifically its hidden ending. It disables all alarm systems in three-mile radius IRL. No one knows how it works, but it does. Back to the danger zone!

“The better quality time you spend sitting on your toilet, the more you’ll live.”, — an officer said.
“I once had a girl blow me while I was shitting,” — Matthias replied — “You have nothing on me.”
“Fair enough!”

It is a little known fact, but the liquid that Northern cities use to clean up snow isn’t quite what it seems like. It’s not salt — in reality, there are bases on Mars, and they store pink goo that… “iMpRoVeS” dead bodies. The liquid is biological in nature, and it expires. Expired liquid is recycled as snow melter. You learn that in high school, but now, living on a train, you should know that there are special learning rooms here, in every. single. carriage. The small gym ball with two handles on its sides is called Gandhi ball. Fun fact: if you wear headless Segways on top of your shoes, and then lay flat holding a Gandhi ball, you can reach the speed of 270 kph!

Today’s news: a Reddit moderator and a legless woman gave birth to a living sex toy for their domestic boar.

Not a rant but wanted to get some thoughts from everyone.

I have health problems and unfortunately just had a seizure a few days ago.... Below is directed at my managers. They are nice guys and when I do get back I need them to accommodate although I feel the entire team should be run like this.

Now taking a step back, I see I need to reestablish my way of doing things/mojo. I cannot handle constant chaos and changes. I have to be in a calm, relaxed environment where I can think and enjoy coding: finding and building solutions. That's the summary of how I got into programming and learned to pick things up.

Furthermore, the ideas of the Phoenix Project and what I've shared over the years are actually what I need to be able to perform and excel. Probably the same for everyone and a good way to preempt burnout. It's just in this case, I am the first to go. I cannot be jumping around all the time and need to establish a comfort/expertise zone (but I do and can extend out when given enough time and opportunity).

I'm thinking the EU team probably operates like this, in a calm and orderly environment, less the rare issues.

Floyd, what time zone are you in?

Been working for a client in different time zone. We are an offshore team of 18 ppl. Now we have 2 an hour long meetings daily, one is our internal and the other is with the client.
Today I mentioned that we are consuming 36 man hours daily just in the meetings and they were like, nah man, we are good. 🙄🙄

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

Every once in awhile i go into a dark zone... Not talking about being depressed or shit like that... I'm talking about a dark place filled with nothing but anger and hatred towards everyone and everything. Where I'm no longer logical or understanding. Where I'm fully controlled by my anger and fueled by the grade A hatred in me.

It's been a couple of weeks now since the last time... I miss it... I need to find a way to get back in there.

Any good bands or songs that can feed my anger with hate?

If I am asked to work on something I don't know then I get into the zone and don't give a fuck about anyone or anything around. If it's something I am familiar with my mind starts to wander and time literally stops. Damn....

What is your goto style of music? What is your empowering 'lets do this' or " I'm in the zone" thing?

For me I have a collection of various genres of music I've collected over time and I slap together several songs at the days start and get going.
Usually I end up looping a single high energy song all day (rock usually. Especially older rock)

I finally got to code something yesterday (I've been slacking OTL everytime I open the Java IDE I use my motivation flies out the window) and I've written down some things to help me do what I need because I forget it if I keep it all in my head. Not that this is a big thing, but it's just to help me to not forget what I've learnt, because I know that'll happen if I don't code.
So I'm coding and checking my notes and all, headphones on, heavy metal blasting, I guess I could say I was in the zone.
Suddenly I get a message from my dad asking me to come to the living room. Turns out my mom had been calling me but I couldn't hear it because I had the headphones on... again 😅 (Sorry mom 😇)
So I left my things and walked to the living room. My mom wanted me to put 2 images I've made for her together. I sat on the couch and waited. And waited. I waited more than I've coded before they called me. I was getting impatient because I was trying to code and I'd been called to wait ;u; I thought I could do it in her computer because it was a simple paint thing so I didn't need the editing program I use.
When she finally showed me what she wanted me to do and I noticed that I hadn't edited one the image she provided me correctly (it didn't look good either way, I butchered the logo she'd given me because stray pixels are a thing that exist 😒 reducing the image also kinda killed it 😅). So I come back to my room and edited it again and made it look a bit better, did what she wanted me to do in the first place and emailed it to her. I went back to the living room and checked it it was good and went back.
I lost too much time and the motivation to code. Played for a bit and then forced myself to go back to coding because I didn't feel motivated (not that I don't like coding, I just lack the motivation most of the time). When I realized it it was 2h30 am and I was getting tired 😴

IMO, music plays a vital role in writing software for me. Without it I can’t get into the “zone”... or as I call it the “grove”, because I don’t really zone out.

I have different genres, songs, and playlists for different situations and languages.

I also, begin to type to the beat of the song.

I have been known to put a song on repeat for hours to lose track of time.

Have a standup desk has really helped with concentration, as once I’m in the grove, I will start moving around to the beat as I work.... It seems like a distraction but it helps.. maybe I’m just ADD.. lol 😂

Anyone else do the same of some sort? What gets you in the grove?

This kid in my class wants to work on a project idea he has with me.
The project sounds useful. A desktop client to find and download our class assignments from the school’s site with a clean GUI and other useful college note taking and organizing features and the potential to be distributed across the school if done well (there’s more too it but typing a lot on phone irks me)

But all the difficult time consuming and not learned in class parts he’s attempting to throw on me cause I’m the TA so in his words ‘I know more and am better suited for the task’.

What he doesn’t fucking realize is I know more because I do my own damn projects outside of class work and my comfort zone so I can get the knowledge to know more I don’t throw 80% of the work on other people so I can stick with the 20% that we’ve basically done in class before

So long story short I’m building my own version (it is an interesting project) with the smaller features (unnecessary for the main purpose) to be added at a later date if I ever feel like it. And he’s trying to get a different TA to do the majority of the work on his own version

If I’m still working on the project wouldn’t it have been better to just work with him even if I’m doing 80% and all the difficult time consuming aspects. Probably. But I just don’t appreciate people throwing everything difficult at me without actual reasons or time restrictions on themselves. I’d prefer just to do it 100% myself since his 20% would’ve been negligible until later anyway

So, about the devRant meetup(see previous rants), I didn't really hear anything about tomorrow, so just in case, I'm continuing with my proposal, it seemed more people were up for Sunday then Friday, so post the time you are free at on Sunday, along with your time zone(or UTC/GMT for privacy)

Started a new job recently. Super cool place, awesome people and I get to do something that actually matters.

But I did get caught up in some organizational changes and have been in a bit of a weird situation. I'm employed in one department, but hired to participate in a project owned by another department. The project is sort of ongoing, but currently in a bit of a twilight zone because a new project team is being put together, and it'll be a few weeks before we're all ready.

Until that time, I am learning tons of new stuff. About the project, the technologies currently used and also exploring new tech and other ways we could go with it.

There's a lot of freedom granted to me, and I've had some good experiences and successes. But it's also a LOT to take in; starting a new job, learning multiple new technology stacks, and waiting for everything to really kick off for good. At which point things might get really hectic.

4, for a school project (and I was in school too). I get distracted really quickly, so I never work for too long. This day I must have been really 'in the zone', because 4h is a really long time for me!

What are your tips/tricks for staying up and alert?

Started a new QA job. 3-11am because the client is in another time zone. I'm up but staying up and alert is a challenge. I might need better coffee. Still falling asleep

Hello everyone, Currently I am working as Lead Developer at one Local Company. I am from Nepal.

The salary here and overall position is quite fascinating but there is no growth of mine here technically because there is no one to judge,teach or mentor you get my point.

So i thought for a switch and applied and got selected as SR. MERN Stack Dev at one UK Based Company. The salary of both companies is quite similar for me. But now it is like starting again from bottom.

Leaving my comfort zone, the hunger of growth. What you think, did i made right decision or not. please let me know. And also please leave few tips on how should i go forward in my remote work because i don't have quite experience in remote work like how time should be managed. What are your tips on that.

Thank you and Cheers :)

Screw it! Finally moved out of toxic, demotivating, slow paced, but really comfortable comfort zone(large company).
It's been a month, relatively very happy, latest tech stack, fast paced environment (literally no one has time to play politics or gossip), with 40% hike. I can clearly see I'm burning out but at least I'm enjoying work.
Down the line I'm sure I appreciate myself for this big move.

I went to an interview a few days ago, just out of curiousity, even though i was sure that i won't be getting any "android developer jobs" there . it was a mega job fair. in one company, me and my friend neil(fake name) went. the interviewer guy was willing to give neil a package upto 10LPA (its a great offer for freshers in my country) based on his current skills of php js, react,angular, ... web stuff .
I had this assumption( and neil did too , we both kind off had the same mindset) that a company teaches us things, we just have to be a little famous/accomplished. So i thought why not? i am accomplished. i got 2 apps on playstore, i am an AAD certified Android dev and know a lot of android stuff, i am quite famous. i am equally as deserving as neil.

But what happenned was something different. When my turn came, the interviewer said " If you have no knowledge of phy/js/node/angular, why are you sitting here?" to which i said " i presumed company would teach me, since i bring some level of expertise from other fields"

so he told me some hard truths **"Companies are fast paced. they don't have time to train you in everything. we seek for candidates having some level of knowledge in the domain, so that we could brush up your skills, increase your knowledge to current requirement and push you to production engineer asap, so that you could be worthy of your salary"**

This is completely correct. i have stuck myself in such a career that its very difficult to sell myself for other job profiles. And from what i have seen, companies seek a very high level of proficiency in this field and rarely recruit freshers( or even if they do, salaries will be aweful)

. Now i am so unsure about what to do next:

A.) keep learning more and more of android and look for job in it. And even if am getting an aweful job offer, just sulk and take it
B.) do open source work/gsoc work?( its a good way to earn more recognition/stipend/knowledge and sometimes even job offers)
C.) learn web dev, data sciences, blockchain, cloud or other stuff that i don't yet know
D.) go back to ds algo / competitive? (because having good competitive knowledge is a safe zone. you are assumed as apure fresher with 0 level of practical knowledge but good level of mathemetics)

I know i am going suck in all of the above except maybe (A) or (B) because (C) is something that am unsure would grab my interest (and even if it did, i am sure i need another 1-2 years to be somewhat good at it) and (D) is something i myself know am uncapable of , i am an average shit in maths(but might mug it all up if i pull all nighters for 1 year)

Time zone just sprang into day time savings yesterday

I had a device monitoring data pollution on a roof that goes to a website. The thing didn’t fucking adjust bday the device stayed on standard time

I spent the entire day thinking what I should adjust for something that most countries don’t do any more why do we even bother with saving daylight.

In addition the timezone I wanted didn’t work right with pandas and I had to do the wrong way to get it “right”

So I’m pretty sure I’m wrong here but I wanna rant anyways:

Had a US to pick up a date or time based on a zone and use that in the db in all locations, US had four functions written and told that only these need updating and DB itself will have no updates. Update four functions and made PR. Tech person who filled in US saw PR and approved, I merged and gave to QA. QA asked why some things aren’t being updated and I said oh those are meant to be updated too and I said ok. Get a defect. Checked that there is way more functions to update than needed, and tried so that no dB update happens in US. Made PR, reviewed and pushed. Still something is still not updating (this time purely mb I guess) another defect. I make PR again and dude asks why I don’t change it in this way which requires a DB change. Resist the urge to tell him he specified in his US no dB change. Did the thing and now it’s still in process. Product owner is pissed with amount of defects from me.

What's your worst time zone story?

I was a frontend developer, and I am new to hadoop or anything related to big data.
I am currently working as a Hadoop developer and I get to work on one of existing codebase also I am trying to recollect Java which I learnt during college.

Can u please provide me any inputs on how to get started with Hadoop, a personal view point on scope and future of Hadoop. A rough time span of how long it took for you to get out of the noob zone.

If you could provide me with a good tutorial or blog that would be awesome.

Thanks in advance

Things that I learned today (15-07-20):
Suppose you have a hosted zone (both private and public) i.e. y.test.com. in AWS r53. and you created r53 DNS record in the public host zone sample1.y.test.com and if you will try to reach this DNS from ec2 you will not be able to. it will give you an error that DNS does not exist but out of ec2, it will work.
To make it work, you have to create the same record in a private hosted zone. Then only you can connect from within an EC2 instance.
So apparently EC2 always looks for the DNS for your registered name server in private hosted zone.

There should be a fail-safe, if it's not in the private hosted zone, it should look in public as well. (idk)

Maybe it was silly of me to not knowing this in the first place. ( wasted good amount of time)

!rant => question?

I'm hired as a freelancer for a start-up that wants to create a social-network-like platform. I've always been a "basic" PHP and javascript developer like using AngularJS, MySQL and my own kinda like PHP MVC framework etc.. But I'm worried that 'this' will come short when the platform expands on the user-base and stuff. That MySQL won't be able to keep up with the expectations and the amountof data, that AngularJS will not be enough for the Frontend,.. I've taken a look at ReactJS, RethinkDB, NodeJS and such, but this is not really within my "comfort zone" and I'm not willing to invest time in something new if it's not able to handle the platform (I don't know if it will..) and I'm afraid that I'll have to start from scratch if it all fails.. (and this is something I can't afford)

So.. What are you guys's opinions? We're not looking at millions of users, but it will have feeds, comments, connections, messages, post scopes,.. Etc. RethinkDB looks promising with the 'watchers' to get live data instantly, but it's a whole new way of query'ing and such.. It just feels like I'm wasting my time because I'm afraid that I'll reach a point in development where I'll have a situation for example like "damn.. This is impossible with angular or php.." [I've shouldn't have agreed to this project..] :D

"We would really prefer it if you didn't attempt to print time zone offset with your DateTime values (because that functionality is utterly borked and prints nonsense)."

From documentation of .Net DateTime.

Hey guys! I'm a founder and CTO of a Buffalo, NY based startup. I graduated last year and I have been working on the startup ever since. I came to the US on a B1 Visa, which allows me to set up the business here but not earn a salary. So I have been working from India (my home country) as a contractor. I travel occasionally to USA for meetings etc. It gets really annoying because of the massive time zone difference, I'm not able to work as efficiently. We are pretty early stage so I can't get an H1b and since I don't have an entity in India, not eligible for l1 visa either.

Can anyone tell me if i have any other options in US/Canada as Canada is just an hour away from Buffalo. I looked at startup visa in Canada but I don't have any investors in Canada hence not eligible for it.

People who do remote work, what's your stance on making calls to get together to do things?

In my case, I have this tech lead boss now who's always available to start calls so I can share my screen and point at what problems I'm having, and I really appreciate that.

Other people at my job are really hard to get into contact with, they're never available when you need them, so if there's some conversation by the nature of which there needs to be a lot of back and forth exchange to get both parties on the same page, more than a day or more can be spent before work based on that conversation can be done.

I'm not talking about distribution of tasks, but rather "person with access to X, I need you to do Y". I invite them to have a call so we can explore how to do Y together, because neither of us know it too well, but they just do whatever, ask how it went, and it turns out wrong. In this particular case, I've got a marketing guy who has access to the company's business account in a social media platform. I need them to add me there as a developer, and make sure I and another developer have all privileges necessary to create and configure an application which will use the social media platform's APIs. Marketing guy just takes hours to respond and generally acts like we're not worth his time, but can't do the things we asked and dedicate the time to see with us if things are working before he sets out to do other work.

This isn't an isolated case, we've got other people who don't look at their messages and are just generally unavailable. Not sure if I have incorrect expectations. Everyone in the company works remote, but we're all in the same time zone.

Okay. Here's the ONLY two scenarios where automated testing is justified:
- An outsourcing company who is given the task of bug elimination in legacy code with a really short timeframe. Then yes, writing tests is like waging war on bugs, securing more and more land inch after inch.
- A company located in an area where hiring ten junior developers is cheaper than hiring one principal developer. Then yes, the business advantage is very real.

That's it. That's the only two scenarios where automated testing is justified. Other such scenarios doesn't exist.

Why? Because any robust testing system (not just "adding some tests here and there") is a _declarative_ one. On top of already being declarative (opposed to the imperative environment where the actual code exists), if you go further and implement TDD, your tests suddenly begins to describe your domain area, turning into a declarative DSL.

Such transformations are inevitable. You can't catch bugs in the first place if your tests are ignorant of entities your code is working with.

That being said, any TDD-driven project consists of two things:
- Imperative code that implements business logic
- Declarative DSL made of automated tests that also describes the same business logic

Can't you see that this system is _wet_? The tests set alone in a TDD-driven project are enough to trivially derive the actual, complete code from it.

It's almost like it's easier to just write in a declarative language in the first place, in the same way tests are written in TDD project, and scrap the imperative part altogether.

In imperative languages, absence of errors can be mathematically guaranteed. In imperative languages, the best performance (e.g. the lowest algorithmic complexity) can also be mathematically guaranteed. There is a perfectly real point after which Haskell rips C apart in terms of performance, and that point happens earlier on than you think.

If you transitioned from a junior who doesn't get why tests are needed to a competent engineer who sees value in TDD, that's amazing. But like with any professional development, it's better to remember that it's always possible to go further. After the two milestones I described, the third exists — the complete shift into the declarative world.

For a human brain, it's natural to blindly and aggressively reject whatever information leads to the need of exiting the comfort zone. Hence the usual shitstorm that happens every time I say something about automated testing. I understand you, and more than that, I forgive you.

The only advice I would allow myself to give you is just for fun, on a weekend, open a tutorial to a language you never tried before, and spend 20 minutes messing around with it. Maybe you'll laugh at me, but that's the exact way I got from earning $200 to earning $3500 back when I was hired as a CTO for the first time.

Good luck!

For the employee goals evaluation, my manager suggested to word "the higher-ups difficult to deal with on the other parts of the world" as "handling complex and challenging situations due to time zone differences"

In few months I went from working independently on a project while developing lots of vertical knowledge to being body rented to another company where I spend most of my time doing calls and continuously reworking a suite of over engineered micro services (after ages instead of progressing we’re rewriting for the nth time basic CRUD because the team keeps coming with new refactoring ideas and since budget/time limit aren’t tight nobody on the high management seems to care of the time we’re wasting). I miss being able to stay “in the zone” for hours without calls, being challenged and learning on the job so I’m considering to find another job.

Another day, another struggle with time zones.

How many fucking helper methods do I need to create for dates and time zones? How many components, pipes and services do I need to wrap just so two datetimes line up? Apparently another one today. At this point I'm ready to accept flat earth theory if it means no more time zones. I'm fucking sold on it if so.

It's not even the time zone that's the issue. It's business needing it formatted, but also offset properly, based on your browser locale, but with points that cross into DST observing time zones of a different locale simultaneously. Sometimes those times are the same, sometimes they're different, sometimes they're different but only in winter. And despite a plethora of libraries to help with these calculations, nothing ever seems to just work out of the box. So here's to another layer of abstraction, because time zones (and DST) are bullshit.

I want to finally implement a minor pet project I spent some time designing a while ago. It's a web service based on encrypted data handling. I'm willing to get out of my comfort zone (that is .NET) and practice the use of different tech. What do you recommend for it?

People around you (especially non-engineers) coming over just to know whether you saw their instant message ping / email to send them a value of a configuration. Or others who just comes in at the right time - when you just got into your utopian magical zone - "just to say hi and catch up". There goes the rest of my day.

Complement that to the instant messaging application of choice of the organization and it's a no-no for productivity. I find myself being invited to random channels only because they want to mention that I did something. I set myself to Away whenever I'm in the mood, but that still doesn't stop people from pinging and sending me notifications anyway.

I hate with a passion Code Review sessions in Pull Requests. It takes days to get approved especially when you have as Lead tech someone with 3 years of experience that rejects PR because doesn't like how I named the variable and also if that person is different time zone.

In my previous company we used to have 30 minutes session if we had PRs and we would go over it.

Dad woke his son up and said
"it's 7 am, wake up and get to work, you lazy shit" .
Son shouted "Don't worry , my service runs in Utc time zone"😂😂😂

I don't consider myself good at all, but I improved a lot with coding competitions, not in programming itself but in problem solving definitely.

Sometimes the best way to improve is to get out of the comfort zone and try something you don't know how to do at the very moment. You'll learn a lot, and learning what you need at the exact time that you need it is way more effective than studying random things from a book for an exam.

What news sources or blogs do you guys use to keep up with your current stacks, or even use to get into other stacks? For example, I usually keep within the Microsoft world of things, so I spend some time periodically going through patch notes on .net or the latest version of vs. If I want to get out of my comfort zone Ill look at a blog like hanselman, or I used to look at spolsky's blog before he went pretty inactive.