A devRant Update!

Hey everyone,

We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.

Highlights since our last update:

- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.

- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!

- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!

Some stuff we have in the pipeline:

- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!

A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:

We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.

What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!

Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.

Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus

The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.

I feel like giving up.

I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.

But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...

...why the fuck bother.

I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.

As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.

But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.

It's never fucking fool-proof enough.

Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?

This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.

If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.

At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.

Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.

I was at my uncle's village.
Where getting internet is big thing,very far from main city.
I was talking with one shopkeeper.
I told him ,I am software developer.

He ask me questions that
"How can I improve my business using software?"

To help me figure out situation.
He told me problems he is facing right now.
Accounting/inventory management/contact's with big retailers.

He was so genuinely explaining it.

He don't want next billion dollar startup.

He want to solved his problem.

I am really impressed after that conversation because person who don't know what is excel is talking about ERP software.

I am going to develop that software.

#respect

When the code is done, but you really want to improve it.

So I was hired about 4 months or so in this companty, we will name it 'Derp & Co.'

The first task they want me to do was to 'clean' an android app that, for what they told me:

- Previous dev fired. said that tasks have been done but totally a lie.
- Took a fully week of 2 fellows coworkers to 'undo' the mess.
- And for the last but not least, zero documentation, like ZERO.

So, I clone the repo, install android studio, blah blah blah, get hands to the pile of code and jesus...

- The whole app was working with a gargantuan json, there was no use of POJOs at all. Objects are for normies.
- A masive copy/paste code, like 'I will need this here, crtl-c... ctrl-v, DONE!'
- Threads are free, isn't it? let's just put a thread whenever I desire to make an HTTP request and not reuse code at all.

So... with this on mind, my first task is to make proper objects:
- Coworker: 'Sorry dev, we don't have documentation for this, you must debug the code to se what the server will send to you'.
- Me: 'Real?'

Shit... ok. So I first try to figure out how the hell is made my gargantuan json. A month was entirely lost to unravel this data and implement Objects, improve their code, reuse code, etc. but at the very end:

- coworker: 'Good job dev, when the POJOs are done, we can focus on the next task, whe have to define a new DATA MODEL because the one we are using now is not good at all'.

*note: the app is on production and working with all the previous 'features' and today it still on use on some enviroments.

- Me: 'Wait... this is a joke, now you want to define new data models? This should have been done in first place!' <WTF face>
- Coworker: 'I don't think so dev, Mr. boss have this list with things to improve on the app an this is the order of do the tasks'.

Mr. boss is on vacations, two days after he came back:

- Mr boss: 'Coworker said that you have been working with POJOs, is that right?'
- Me: 'Yes'
- Mr boss: 'Why? Did not see the need of a new data model?'
- Me: 'I told that to him, but he insist on "the order" of the list.
- Mr. boss <facepalm>

This is one of the few tales i have from 'Derp & Co.'

PS: Sorry if i made a mistake on writing, english is not my first language and maybe I have done some mistakes.

[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]

Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.

That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.

If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!

#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

If you want to improve, be with people that are already better than you.

That's what I do, and so far so good.

Juniors are a fun bunch to work with.
Over confident, hero complex of that fresh graduate high, and then thrown in to the real world! Where there hopes and dreams are crushed in minutes when they see what monolithic applications really look like!!

But don't let that overwhelm you, your not going to be changing all of it any time soon, hell some of this code hasn't been touched in 5+ years and still works without fail.

Don't stress about the work load, you can only write 1 line of code at a time anyway, and hell, even seniors make mistakes.

The key about being able to manage this beast is simple, break it! Because the more you break it, the more you'll understand how a project is put together, for better or worse. Learn from the examples in front of you, and learn what not to do in the future 😎

But more importantly, plan your changes, whiteboard the high level logic of what it is you want to add, then whiteboard in the current codebase and determine where to slice this bitch up, then when it all looks well and good, take out your scalpel and slice and dice time.
Don't worry, your changes aren't going to production anytime soon, hell, you'll be lucky to get past the first pull request with this working 100% the first time, and that's a good thing, learn from tour short comings and improve your own knowledge for the next time!

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

Startup: let's improve on our MVP and build an actual website app.

Me: ok.

[go through 2 weeks discovery and planning stage]

Manager1: love working with you. You explain and work in a really professional manner.

[MVP gets built in 2 months, I'm the only dev designer devops throughout]

Manger1: Omg love it! Wait till the other manager sees it. I knew you were right person for the job.

Other users: oo cool. I love features x, y, z.

[two days later shows to Manager2]

Manager2: x doesn't work, feature you is not useful and doesn't work... Hate it. I think we'll move you to another project.

Me: (woah that escalated quickly meme plays in my mind)

Me: [explaining MVP, lean methodology, your internal decision making processes]

...

Manager2: Yeh we want you to not work on any development work (even though those are your skills and extensive knowledge etc) we need you to do admin tasks (that have nothing to do with product or coding etc)

Manager1 and employees: 😲 wtf

Me: I quit

- - -

Now they are struggling in every way possible and don't have enough funds to hire another person close to what they need to help them.

Hi, am new so i want to say hello!

Like this place and their people so i decide to create an account :D

Sorry for my english. Am on the way to improve it.

I hate it when people don't want to work for themselves and when I share something for their knowledge

"Wow what pro", "Dude you're so smart" etc in a sarcastic manner.

Dude wtf, you don't want to improve yourself then fuck off. You're there because of yourself not because I fucked it up for you.

You reap what you sow and i don't need people discrediting my effort to get to where I am today. I get it, I'm not even what you would call "pro", So what shitface?! I wanna be there someday. If you don't then just die. I don't need people like you in my life 😬😬😬

When you start a new job as a Senior Developer, and start asking questions about the code, and you have these collections of conversations with other front-end people:

Exhibit 1:
Me: Ahh so I see the filtering and pagination is all done with Javascript in the front end...

Random dev: No, it's done with Angular.

Exhibit 2:
Me: I think we should add frontend pagination to this page. There will be too many elements on it if you're a customer with 2000 servers.

Random dev: Don't bother, there's no pagination in the API call... So that will not gain any performance.

Me: But it wouldn't take long to implement and it would improve the user experience, why would you want to show ALL the elements, when you have an option not to... Also, it WILL be a major performance hit, especially on mobile.

Random dev: People will use search anyway.

😥🔪

Also, there are no coding standards, every file looks different, and my opinion is being disregarded in everything, and I thought my last job was bad...

Seriously how are some people hired as front-enders?

Since I just took this job, I feel obligated to stay a couple of months... But hey, don't cry for me, I might have more rants for you. 😂

Sorry for the long rant, here's cake: 🍰

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I recalled a seemingly simple task I took on.

We were building a booking system, and I had to figure out how to retrieve bookings by a certain date range.

Upfront, the tasked seemed simple until I realised I had to both figure out the logic and the SQL statements needed to retrieve all bookings within a certain date range in one query.

I ended up drawing a model to help me visualise the various date-range criteria to be satisfied. And used unit tests to help me think through each date range criterion and make sure they were accurate. Some were obviously from paranoia, but better to be safe than sorry...

After that, I had wrote down raw SQL directly into Sequel Pro first to make sure my query logic was accurate too, before translating into something the ORM equivalent. This was when I learned how to define and use variables in SQL. The variables were throw-away code; I just didn't want to have to hard-code the test date-ranges over and over again; minimise chances of spelling errors.

Needless to say, felt my problem-solving skills went up one level after this task. Saw my coding style and unit tests improve. And also the thought processes that go into how to maintain code quality...

!rant

Some days ago I finished "Ray tracing in a weekend" (Peter Shirley) and I'm learning a lot :D

In the new year I will start with "Ray tracing the next week", but there are still some things I want to tackle before that (improve code quality, optimize... it's my first project that is bigger than a codeforces problem solution, a part from the projects at work).

Any sources of wisdom and recommendations are welcome!!

We want to improve the portal by making apps for it what can you do or recommend?

Well holy shit this is new you're actually asking the dev team for advice on a future project.

Normally you immediately go to a third party waste a shit ton of money and then tell us we have a week to add whatever it is into our system.

Then when we can't do it or have to delay other projects you're dragging our manager into a meeting with the CEO complaining that IT are refusing to cooperate or are holding up the project etc.

The change of heart is much appreciated but where the fuck did this come from? New year resolution?

FLOYD IS HERE 😎

Gather around kids, it's story time.

So my first breakup left me so damaged and I was in darkest phase of my life. I was alone. Physically, mentally, and emotionally. I went for therapy and spearheaded into success and grew in life soooo fucking much.

31st December 2016, I first joined dR and since the first day this place felt home. Met some of brightest mind and most amazing souls here (sadly many left the place).

I used to shit post and rant a lot. But I loved everyone here. But then I don't quite remember, but I decided to quit this place as community started to grow. Many others left as well.

I came back here in 2019 IIRC and started all over again. Got along well with new members and started having fun.

I used to crib and cry about being underpaid. Lost a kickass Europe job due to pandemic.

I will skip what all happened between me and @Scout but she is a sweetheart, though very rough and brutal with me at times (actually very often), but she is so selfish for me and cares for me that I couldn't resist but listen to her always. A lifelong friend for sure :)

I used to rant about my dumb office colleagues. Definitely not the sharpest minds but good people at heart (which I did not realise).

So in October 2020, I earned a new job and my company retained me with a 100% raise and a promotion making me lead of product innovation and UX.

November end I met a girl in professional context on LinkedIn who was conducting a workshop. Being hungry for learning, meeting new people and kill my lockdown boredom, I singed up.

Now I went for December break and my colleagues sent me a gift hamper when they came to know I got a promotion. I felt bad that I ranted about them so I deleted my account and also wanted a social detox.

Post the workshop, I started conversing casually with the girl I met. She was married. But things hit off. Eventually in February end I confessed that I had feelings for her and in next few days she reciprocated. I told her I was aware of her marital status and it's okay if nothing happens between us. Then she started to open up of how she was with one guy for 17 years and was abused in everyway and wanted to separate but never had the courage and all.

She decided to file for paperwork and then be with me. Things got messy when her family got involved thinking I was causing all of it.

She went back to her partner and I realised I had some emotional and mental issues of a person's past that bothered me. But we were overcoming it. Soon the honeymoon period started phasing out.

Her family started giving me death threats. We went underground even further. More arguments and fights between us.

@Scout kept telling me I was stupid and I disregarded her. I feel like an idiot for not listening to her.

That girl kept gaslighting me, hurting me intentionally, scratching the surface made me realise how broken and damaged she was. She lied to me and created fake persona of herself to make me fall for her. Everything was lie. Literally.

I felt horrible for trusting her. My trauma relapsed and I started having crazy panic attacks leading to self harm and being suicidal. That girl was drugged all the time with psychological medicines and very poor character & personality in general (I don't want to judge anyone but just stating the facts).

Eventually she just disappeared and I was like fuck this. Earlier, after every fight, she used to show fake affection and I used to melt but not this time.

I was like fuck this shit. I have some super amazing friends like @kiki who helped me overcome this. I started going for therapy and realised what all areas I need to improve. My therapist is soooo brilliant, she understands the root cause instantly and also knows how to fix it. And the same day I and both my parents were COVID-19 positive. Last few weeks were dark and haunting.

Further more, the girl comes back after a week and then acts as a 'nice girl'.
Initially fake affection, then drama, followed by making me guilt trip, then threats, and now blaming me.

I kept ignoring her calls (50 to 70 calls in a day), emails, left her unread on Telegram, and everything I could do to ignore her without blocking her. I started gaining my happiness back.

During this mess, I lost 5+ KG of weight. She has no friends in her mid 30s. Knows no life or survival skills. Her family hates her, no career, no emotional or mental maturity, literally nothing. Insanely dumb and toxic manipulative person who is not even worth being called an ex. As per her everyone around her is an asshole except her. Every time something happened, she used to blame and bad mouth the other person. Now she is doing with me. In all her life situations, either she was a hero or a victim. One upped me all the time. Now that I see it, I hate myself for allowing it all of it and now having enough self worth to walk out of it earlier.

Continued in comments...

You know what you sound like when you say that "I want to be a programmer but this code is offensive so remove it"? It's like saying that "I want to be a surgeon but I don't like blood, so remove the blood right now."

I personally don't really like blood a whole lot, especially when it comes out of the bodies of other people. I don't really want to become a surgeon, but let's say that I would. "Teacher, I don't like blood, I want to become a surgeon but I hate blood!!! MAKE ALL PATIENTS STOP BLEEDING NOW!!!"

To which my teacher surgeon would of course respond: "Well how about you don't become a surgeon then, because humans that are cut open do bleed, and there's nothing we can do about it."

Same thing with code. You know why code is written? To be a useful tool, for people to become more productive by running the thing (unlike the average SJW). And normal people, you know how much they care about the code? They only care for it as much as for it to be able to run properly. And the ones that do look in the source code either want to improve its functionality or check whether it's actually something decent, secure, safe to run etc etc. People don't normally look at code for the sake of getting offended by something.

But the formulation used in the code, does it even matter? Jerk, it's a term that's used in physics. Does it refer to your despised white cis males whacking off? Of course it doesn't, it's a term to describe change in acceleration. Masters and slaves in code, does it refer to slavery? Most certainly it doesn't. So why bother?

6 months ago:

Boss: We have this idea to improve our onboarding to avoid drop off in the new app. See this section here? Were going to take that out of the onboarding and just let them pass straight through to the app. Then when they get into the app, there will be a banner telling them they should go to settings and set this up. That way they can ignore it for a while and get into the app sooner

Me: Get into the app sooner to do what?

Boss: Explore it

Me: Explore an empty app with no content, as they are a brand new user with nothing setup? While theres a big banner on the screen saying "You have insecure settings" ... basically forcing them to do it straight away anyway?

Boss: Yeah, we can give them some recommendations or something while they click around. It will be good. This is months away anyway, we'll talk again

Yesterday:

Boss: So this weird unexpected thing happened. We showed some beta users our plans to remove this section from onboarding and they felt weird about it. They said they didn't like the idea of the banner telling them they haven't set it up correctly

Me: Thats not weird, I said the same thing 6 months ago

Boss: ......... oh, really?

Me: Yep. Its not an improvement to get them through onboarding quicker, just to tell them they have to now go do it somewhere else

Boss: ... right. Ok maybe we'll build it anyway and see how they feel with it in there hands?

Me: nope

Boss: ... what do you mean?

Me: We are behind, you've asked me 3 times in the last week if we are going to be able to get everything in on time ... and now you want me to build something that everyone, apart from you, says they don't like. So realistically, i'm going to build it, and then remove it next week ... and we'll have a discussion about what has to be dropped because of this

Boss: ........ right .... ok .... hhhmmm

Me: *sits with resting bitch face*

Boss: ... maybe we can hide the banner until later. Not show it to them until they've done something in the app?

Me: ... maybe we can not do any of this?

Boss: right but then the onboarding will ...

Me: *talks louder* ... yes will be the way our users want it to be

Boss: ... hhmm i'm not sure

Me: Ok heres what we'll do, so long as it doesn't delay me getting the designs I need, feel free to have the designer mock up what it would look like using that figma on device preview thing. If users say they like it, i'll build it

Boss: ... right but it won't be real on device app so ...

Me: Its that or we cut feature X

Boss: ... well we need that

Me: ok glad we agree, let me know what feedback the designer gets

Boss: ... ok

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

No dedicated tester means less expenses.

No personal parkspot?
No expenses!

And no good staging or testing environment? Less expenses!

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

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

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

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

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

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

You finished the site?
Great!

But here are 101 bugs to solve before next week.

All hail their crazy company!

"Don't reinvent the wheel..." - I read it often, still I hate to use foreign code. It's not only that I do it for learning purposes. I just don't trust them. I want to keep the control, I want to understand my application and I want to be to blame when things fuck up.
I would probably through my laptop if my website gets hacked because of some fucking plugin or code I found somewhere on the internet.

So yes, I will invent the wheel new. At least I will spent some time to understand how this particular wheel is made, how it rolls and how I can improve it for my specific situation.

Sometimes my tires have some uncommon profile, but they fit to the stuff they are made for.

This rant is particularly directed at web designers, front-end developers. If you match that, please do take a few minutes to read it, and read it once again.

Web 2.0. It's something that I hate. Particularly because the directive amongst webdesigners seems to be "client has plenty of resources anyway, and if they don't, they'll buy more anyway". I'd like to debunk that with an analogy that I've been thinking about for a while.

I've got one server in my home, with 8GB of RAM, 4 cores and ~4TB of storage. On it I'm running Proxmox, which is currently using about 4GB of RAM for about a dozen VM's and LXC containers. The VM's take the most RAM by far, while the LXC's are just glorified chroots (which nonetheless I find very intriguing due to their ability to run unprivileged). Average LXC takes just 60MB RAM, the amount for an init, the shell and the service(s) running in this LXC. Just like a chroot, but better.

On that host I expect to be able to run about 20-30 guests at this rate. On 4 cores and 8GB RAM. More extensive migration to LXC will improve this number over time. However, I'd like to go further. Once I've been able to build a Linux which was just a kernel and busybox, backed by the musl C library. The thing consumed only 13MB of RAM, which was a VM with its whole 13MB of RAM consumption being dedicated entirely to the kernel. I could probably optimize it further with modularization, but at the time I didn't due to its experimental nature. On a chroot, the kernel of the host is used, meaning that said setup in a chroot would border near the kB's of RAM consumption. The busybox shell would be its most important RAM consumer, which is negligible.

I don't want to settle with 20-30 VM's. I want to settle with hundreds or even thousands of LXC's on 8GB of RAM, as I've seen first-hand with my own builds that it's possible. That's something that's very important in webdesign. Browsers aren't all that different. More often than not, your website will share its resources with about 50-100 other tabs, because users forget to close their old tabs, are power users, looking things up on Stack Overflow, or whatever. Therefore that 8GB of RAM now reduces itself to about 80MB only. And then you've got modern web browsers which allocate their own process for each tab (at a certain amount, it seems to be limited at about 20-30 processes, but still).. and all of its memory required to render yours is duplicated into your designated 80MB. Let's say that 10MB is available for the website at most. This is a very liberal amount for a webserver to deal with per request, so let's stick with that, although in reality it'd probably be less.

10MB, the available RAM for the website you're trying to show. Of course, the total RAM of the user is comparatively huge, but your own chunk is much smaller than that. Optimization is key. Does your website really need that amount? In third-world countries where the internet bandwidth is still in the order of kB/s, 10MB is *very* liberal. Back in 2014 when I got into technology and webdesign, there was this rule of thumb that 7 seconds is usually when visitors click away. That'd translate into.. let's say, 10kB/s for third-world countries? 7 seconds makes that 70kB of available network bandwidth.

Web 2.0, taking 30+ seconds to load a web page, even on a broadband connection? Totally ridiculous. Make your website as fast as it can be, after all you're playing along with 50-100 other tabs. The faster, the better. The more lightweight, the better. If at all possible, please pursue this goal and make the Web a better place. Efficiency matters.

S = Some person I know
Me = Me

S: Hey, I heard you also do [software/web development].. I was hoping to get some advice from you about some advanced level HTML and CSS for my classes.
//or that if I could teach him something

Me: What do you study?

S: Oh, I teach.

Me: 😯 Really? What do you teach?

S: Oh, just some basic HTML and CSS with Notepad to about 50-60 students.

Me: (;﹏;) That's great.

/*this is a shortened version of a very long conversation*/

They teach some basic HTML and CSS like <table> and <marquee> and stuff. They also teach C++ and Tally ERP.

Also, he and some other person made their small intuitions' website but they don't know how to put it online. They made it in, as far as I understand, simple HTML and CSS USING NOTEPAD (Don't know if they used JS or something else). That's.. really courageous or something... ? I don't know, I couldn't have a look at it because they have it on their local computer and don't know what Git is.

I showed him some better alternatives and ways that they could use (editors, version control, db, etc.) to improve their curriculum and answered his questions, and I told him that I'll try to help in any way I can if they ever need me.

This also made me realize how much I've learned and grown since I first started learning C in school. Still, I've got so much more that I need and want to learn.
//Always keep learning
😊

PS. What would you've told him if you had been in my place?

I've always just done CSS on my own by hand for every project because I thought it would improve my skills over time but now I've discovered Bulma with it's sass variables and responsiveness and things are just so pretty now, I never want to go back

So a few months ago I started dating. I love my girlfriend with all my heart, but something has been bothering me a bit. I can no longer easily do my day-to-day work. Whereas previously I would be productive at any time I want, now it's more of a "I can work whenever she wants to work". It's hard to balance and even harder to actually get to it.

Previously I would stay with her during the day, and then wake up in the night to do all the household chores, learn her language and if I can get to it, even improve some of my shitty code. Needless to say, she didn't like that I didn't sleep with her and it's not exactly healthy either - I barely slept at all.

How do you balance work/relationship without throwing sleep time in the mix? Both work and girlfriend are at home for me.

My own text mmorpg and it's selfmade Chat system! <3

Yeah it's barebones and has some flaws, but its the first project I set an worked through with a very pleasing result ^^

It's a CLI-Style interface with a command and chat mode, multiple rooms, user descriptions etc.

Some day I want to improve it even further, bring much more functionality in the mix, but first I would have to reinforce the base/core of the program ^^

I work for "a" company. This company has completely broken my desire to improve user experiences.

For instance, they have fetishized reducing the amount of clicks users have to go through to improve user productivity. Normally this is good, in their grossly mutated views, not so much.

They want ALL the data on a single page, and want people to use ctrl+f to find whatever they want on these pages instead of, ya know, a site-wide search(which fucking exists).

So this makes page times and UX horrible, some pages will take upwards of 2 minutes to completely load. 2 fucking minutes! My team and I had reduced these down to 15 seconds by reducing the data displayed and paginating it using some awesome JS lazy load functions. Not great by any real metric, but still a huge improvement.

You know who uses it out of 400 employees? Me. You know who still constantly gets complaints that the pages load really fuckin slowly? Still me!

Fuck these dumb asses and their retarded ideologies. They are stuck so far up 1990s ass they can practically TASTE Clintons' taint.

The culture is so toxic for developers it's absolutely abhorrent and depressing.

There is no freedom to do what you need to do because you're too busy doing the things they ask you to do. Follow that up with quarterly performance reports that bring up questions like, "What do you do for us?".

The only positive to working in this shithole is that they wouldn't dare fire you because they would never find anyone that would stay long enough to become an expert on this pile of shit. Over the last year we have gone through an entire 16 dev team, twice. That's 36 developers that just straight up quit in 12 months, and it's not like any of them worked together either. I would say 3-4 out of the first group met the second group, and 1-2 stuck around for the current group.

I don't normally rant like this, but I've been holding this shit in for a very long time and I can't hold it in.

They've literally left me with nothing to do. I'm doing nothing. I can't be happy doing nothing.

To illustrate the chaos: Everyone on the team was trying to figure out some defect. No one knows what is going on in the code. It's unlike anything I've ever seen.

I found an API call with a misspelled endpoint. It was wrong since the code was written two months before. There's no way it ever worked. Obviously no one tested the code because they would have immediately seen that the call returned a 404 every time.

I fixed it. That was my only PR in about a month. It was literally one character.

The next week that PR got reverted. Apparently the app works better if the API call fails. No one said what goes wrong if the request is made, just that it "causes problems."

That's how bad it is. No one knows why anything does or doesn't work. People write code that doesn't work, never test it, and the application works better in some unspecified way if that code never gets executed.

The last straw for me was when an architect told us that if we want to improve our skills we need to learn how to read and debug stuff like this.

1) Not to be immodest, but I'm good at figuring out bad code.
2) Just because I can doesn't mean I want to do it all day instead of actually developing software
3) He trivialized the really important skill, not making a mess like this in the first place. If his idea of skill is to sling crap without tests at the wall and then debug it, how is he an architect?

I tried really hard but I can't keep a good attitude. I don't want to become toxic, but why would I consider working that way? I try my best to be good at this. Writing decent code means a lot to me. It should mean a lot to them. Their code is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe millions.

I can't write good code and add value if all I do is debug bad code.

So I'm out. I'm going to another project. Have a nice life.

Building a business can hamper one's development urges!

I have been building stuff since 2008. Took my first job in 2012, won a hackathon at Yahoo right after that. Got an amazing team to work with! Our team converted the hacked product into a proper product using Django and AngularJS. Those were the fun days. At that time AngularJS had just come out and I was under the dilemma to use Angular, Ember or backbone. But with all this came the responsibility to build a business out of our product. It didn't happen eventually though.

So I moved on to cure my entrepreneural itch and went on to start up an e-commerce startup along with my day job. It started getting good traction and I finally left my day job to focus completely on it. It's a sticker marketplace and I had to focus a lot on the actual physical product, improve the quality, tackle business development and stuff etc. In all this, my habit of creating stuff with code kind of got the back seat. Everyday, I see such exciting technologies come up and I want to try them out. I have been itching to create a native app using react native. Try to build a skill for Amazon Alexa.

On one side I am happy that I have been able to build a brand and become the largest sticker marketplace in India providing super awesome reusable stickers, but on the other hand, managing the business on a daily basis is killing the developer in me :(

Does anyone else building a business which involves a physical product also face a similar problem? I think I should just take up weekend hackathon type problems and try to solve them using the technologies I want to learn. Example, I have been meaning to build an app for our company. I think I will start with that!

I have been following devRant for quite sometime now and it has been awesome. Finally, signed up and ranted today! 😊😊

Rant #1:
Why everyone and their toy cars gotta be jumping on the bed when I’m trying to sleep?

Rant #2:
For months now, I get bleary eyed and tired every time I look at work. Focusing and being productive is almost impossible. I’m cheery and alert, then sit down, open my editor, and find I can’t focus. Moments later I feel like I need a nap.

Rant #3:
I get interrupted an average of every 3-5 minutes, basically every day, all day long. The more this happens, the more tired and angry I become. I often have to resort to yelling, throwing toys that appear on my desk/keyboard, and blasting loud music I don’t want to hear through noise canceling headphones.

—————

Is it any wonder I can’t focus or think or do anything but feel like I’m falling asleep? Is it any wonder I’m perpetually angry and frustrated?

I can sort of fix the interruptions by locking myself away in my monster’s room. But I’m still so tired and bleary and can’t focus. I don’t know what to do, or even what I can do. Vacation didn’t help. Another would doubtlessly be just as effective, and certainly wouldn’t improve my boss’s view of my performance.

Ugh.

Spend 14 hours a week studying more with my free time.

Things to be studied:

-discrete math
-data structures
-algorithms
-coding challenges
-problem defining
-abstraction
-other relevant maths

Other things I want to improve:

-confidence at work
-reaching out to teams with questions
-social skills
-time management
-enjoying the little things
-patience
-consistency (with everything above)

Last big thing would be being more conscious with what type of data/platforms I am digesting everyday. Just like a good diet I want to get in the habit of consuming “good” useful content that’s thought provoking or knowable rather than fast food social media carbs

Wish everyone a productive New Year!

My father's PC is almost dead.
The PSU is damaged and it turns on correctly 1 time out of 250 or more.
There are days that he tries to turn it on at 8am, and it can finally use it at 8pm.

Also the other HW components are old, so I tried to convince him to buy a new PC, there was an offer where they also give you for free a new 24 inches monitor (now he has a fucking 19 inches old one).
But he doesn't want to invest in a PC.
Even if he spends almost the entire day by surfing on internet and watching movies!

So, I recommended him to change only the PSU, the same identical model costs only €39.
But he doesn't want to invest in it... he prefers to lose the entire day trying to use his fucking PC.

I really don't understand why some people just don't want to spend a bit to improve their life!
The comfort is worth it... the time of life you're wasting to use that fucking PC is more important than €39.

I tried different times to find other possible issues, but it's clearly a PSU problem, so obviously I can't fix it using magic.
Not in my father's opinion... "You don't know anything about computer science... nothing! Go to your fucking university (I'm studing Computer Engineering), and study how to fix it!".
While he was saying that sentence, he was beating the case, because he's convinced that it's a better way to fix it.

I want to leave this fucking house right now.

sprint retros with PM are a fucking farce, it cannot possibly get any more grotesque.

they are held like this:
- in the meeting, PM asks each team member directly what they found good and bad
- only half of the team gives real negative feedback directed towards the PM or the process, because they are intimidated or just not that confrontative
- when they state a bad point, he explains them that their opinion is just wrong or they just need to learn more about the scrum process, in any case he didn't do anything wrong and he is always right
- when people stand up against this behavior, he bullshits his way out, e.g. using platitudes like "it's a learning process for the whole team", switching the topic, or solely repeating what he had just said, acting like everybody agreed on this topic, and then continue talking
- he writes down everything invisible for the team
- after the meeting he mostly remembers sending a mail to the team which "summarizes" the retro. it contains funny points like "good: living the agile approach" (something he must have obviously hallucinated during the meeting)
- for each bad point from team members, he adds a long explanation why this is wrong and he is doing everything right and it's the team's fault
- after that happens the second part of the retro, where colleagues from the team start arguing with him via mail that they don't feel understood or strongly disagree with his summary. of course he can parry all their criticism again, with his perfectly valid arguments, causing even longer debates
- repeated criticism of colleagues about poor retro quality and that we might want to use a retro tool, are also parried by him using arguments such as "obviously you still have to learn a lot about the scrum process, the agile manifesto states 'individuals and interactions over processes and tools', so using a tool won't improve our sprint retros" and "having anonymous feedback violates the principles of scrum"
- when people continue arguing with him, he writes them privately that they are not allowed to criticize or confront him.

i must say, there is one thing that i really like about PM's retro approach:
you get an excellent papertrail about our poor retro quality and how PM tries to enforce his idiocratic PM dictatorship on the team with his manipulative bullshit.

independently from each other, me and my colleague decided to send this papertrail to our boss, and he is veeeery interested.

so shit is hitting the fan, and the fan accelerates. stay tuned シ

> IHateForALiving: I have added markdown on the client! Now the sys admin can use markdown and it's going to be rendered as HTML
> Team leader: ok, I've seen you also included some pics of the tests you made. It's nice, there's no XSS vulnerabilities, now I want you to make sure you didn't introduce any SQL injection too. Post the results of the tests in the tickets, for everybody to see.

I've been trying to extract from him for 15 minutes how sending a text through a markdown renderer on the client is supposed to create a SQL injection on the server, I've been trying to extract from him how showing all of this to the world would improve our reputation.
I miserably failed, I don't know how the fuck am I supposed to test this thing and if I a colleague wasted time to make sure some client-side rendering didn't create a SQL injection I'd make sure to point and laugh at them every time they open their mouth.

God of War comes out tomorrow.

Video Games are my passion, it's the reason I want to learn more about computers and technology. And each new major game title sparks new motivation.

What helps yall invigorated to improve?

Do you guys know about the Windows 10 operating system?

I highly recommend it.

It is so easy to get done whatever you want in just a few clicks or.. several.

It has a great web browser called Internet Explorer that comes pre-installed with it. If you love animations, it will even sometimes show you that beautiful loading animation for as long as it wants. If you have a habit of wasting time on the Internet, it will intelligently slow things down and become unresponsive to help you get rid of that bad habit. It's just that great.

It has a lot of great features pre-enabled for you like sending data to Microsoft to improve your experience on a personal level. The operating system cares so much about you, unlike other operating systems that represent a flightless bird.

It's so smart, it even keeps you from doing stupid things like customizing the operating system. It makes sure that you live in the given box and don't break anything. So caring, right?!

At random times, it shows you a blue screen and a sad face to remind you that life can be sad at times but you gotta keep going. It is profound.

It comes with great useless software that you absolutely don't even need! How great is that!

I use Windows 10 and I recommend that you do too.

Have a good day..

Please disregard. I just need to vent.

Being a manager is so fucking shit. This is not even about devs or tech specific only. Never become a manager.
Why? Because it’s about handling people and all the dumb shit they do. It’s all about knowing what people suck at and preventing that weakness from leaking into other areas. The amount of fucked up people on this earth means that you have to work with at least some of them, and that means putting up with their stupid ass list of super special requirements, that if they do not fulfill, will make them a shit worker. It’s not even an issue of technical skills.

You have the guys that are often late, because “they have depression”, but will complain that “companies don’t treat employees like adults”. Being on time for work is apparently very difficult. Which doesn’t generally matter in general for dev work, but it ends up affecting other things.

You have the completely socially inept idiots that make half the team hate them and try to avoid working with them, increasing problems and work for other people. Just because they’re socially stupid, have low or no empathy, or are incapable of not being insufferable to others.

You have the people that are so bad at estimating that they keep making up numbers instead of waiting to think for a few minutes and say “ not sure, I need to research and estimate that”.

You have the surprise absentee for dumb as fuck reasons like “my phone died lol sorry”. They never do anything to actually improve, it is just “sorry guys! Btw I will do jackshit about this”.

Or the ones whining about virtually everything, all the time. Wtf why do I have to be on scrum at 12 tomorrow?! Wtf why do I have to record the result of that customer call? Wtf why should I talk with XYZ?

And if you leave them alone, everything burns. They actually need someone to tell them “hey mate you need to improve that, shall we plan something to do so?”. I think managers are useless and unneeded when you have adults working, but it seems like most of the population is composed of children. It’s basically another form of daycare.

And you have to prepare shit around all of these constraints.

Then you have the one guy that reads the requirements, has common sense, and is inoffensive and can work like a normal adult human that needs no baby sitting. A ray of light on this shitshow.

I just want to go back to pure dev.

Most kids just want to code. So they see "Computer Science" and think "How to be a hacker in 6 weeks". Then they face some super simple algebra and freak out, eventually flunking out with the excuse that "uni only presents overtly theoretical shit nobody ever uses in real life".

They could hardly be more wrong, of course. Ignore calculus and complexity theory and you will max out on efficiency soon enough. Skip operating systems, compilers and language theory and you can only ever aspire to be a script kiddie.
You can't become a "data scientist" without statistics. And you can never grow to be even a mediocre one without solid basic research and physics training.

Hack, I've optimized literal millions of dollars out of cloud expenses by choosing the best processors for my stack, and weeks later got myself schooled (on devRant, of all places!) over my ignorance of their inner workings. And I have a MSc degree. Learning never stops.

So, to improve CS experience in uni? Tear down students expectations, and boil out the "I just wanna code!" kiddies to boot camps. Some of them will be back to learn the science. The rest will peak at age 33.

So here's the deal. I am a team lead of a small company and I have a junior who is an idiot. I mean literally, idiot. We code in Python mostly and as Python is not structured as a default Java or C# project, the developer needs to be very careful so that the structure (or tiers) is maintained properly.

Now this girl, always messes up the tiers. Say one enhancement can be easily implemented in the UI tier, she would do the implementation in the core Db access layer, which may complete this particular enhancement, but breaks all the other functions (sometimes the whole project) connected to that particular module of the Db layer. She doesn't do any integration testing after updating the code, she only checks the current enhancement she is working on. When the enhancement goes to the testing phase, the testers find those broken functions and that results a re-work (most of the times done by me).

I have warned her. Even our manager has warned her. She always tells that she is working to improve herself. But I know, she isn't. She mostly chats with her boyfriends (yes, with an 's') when she has no work to do. She never upgrades herself or works on her skills.

I can easily report about her, and they will fire her without any warning (they did it already with a guy earlier). I don't want to do that again. What should I do? Any suggestions?

Oh, she has a great ego. She thinks that knows and understands everything. She will listen to your suggestions carefully, but will never follow those.

So my department is "integrating CI/CD"

Right now, there's a very anti-automation culture in the deployment process, and out of our many applications, almost none have automated testing. And my groups is the only one that uses feature branching - one of the few groups that uses branching at all beyond "master, dev"

So yeah... You could see how this is already ENTIRELY fucked from the very beginning.

First thing they want to do is add better support for a process... Which goes directly against CI/CD.

The process is that to deploy to production (even after it is manually approved by manager), someone in another department needs to press a button to manually deploy. This, as far as I can tell, is for business rule reasons rather than technical ones.

They want us to improve that (the system will stay exactly the same with some streamlined options for said button pressers)

I'm absolutely astounded at the way our management wants to do something but goes in exactly the opposite direction. It's like the found an article of what CI/CD was and then took notes on exactly what not to do.

One thing I learned over the years is that even when you think you can't do something or don't have the strength to do it, you actually can.

People do nothing better than to make excuses for themselves or blame others for the things they did without even considering that they could have done something about it.

The brain is a powerful processor to the point that when you think you're sick constantly your body will react accordingly.

Thing is though. If you don't take the opportunities that present themselves or don't look for them you'll probably get nowhere to the point where it could lead to depression.

Sure enough failures and mistakes happen all the time, ardly anything will go right the first time possibly leading to becoming demotivated and sometimes even depression.

Why? Because you forgot to think "what can I improve the next time"

A co-worker of mine keeps going back to his project he's working on because the boss has something in mind but somehow fails to translate it to him. He never stops to think what the desired functionality is compared to what it should do or look like (UI/UX). Eventually he snaps blaming the boss that he had to change it a couple of times.

This has happened multiple times since I started my Internship to the point where it just starts to irritate me.

Of course it's not always your fault but there are plenty of cases where it is or where you could have prevented it.

Mistakes and failures make you stronger only if you want to learn from them.

Have a good day

So today I realized that Im not happy.

When I was a kid I wanted to do many things because I had time and energy but I had no money. Now that Im an adult and I have the money, I have no energy and no will power to try and have personal life in these few hours left of my day. I spend 9 hours at work everyday and totally 1hr 30min is wasted on commuting.

I spent 4 years in uni between lectures and working on my side projects, and I really believed that after uni I will get a job and my life work balance will improve.

After uni I spent 2 years working abroad in 3 jobs at 3 countries. I work as android dev and now Im making a really decent salary.

However Im not happy at all. I realized that life is not about the money. Im changing countries like socks and dont even feel the need to socialize or enjoy my life anymore. Im european and these other eu countries are not that different at all. It came to a point where relationships are meaningless to me. I became an office drone who cares only about work and outside of work I care only about my projects and more work.

At this point im only 25 years old with around 2 years of experience and money is really good, but fuck it Im so tired of being an emigrant and having no stability in life. Im so drained. I spent past 6 years (4 in uni combined with side projects and 2 years working in 3 jobs in different countriee) working my ass off and lying to myself that after the next big thing Im gonna take a break and enjoy life. But its never enough. I dont want to hit 30s or 40s and realize that I wasted my life on pursuing money and didnt get to enjoy life..

Im really considering taking a 6-12 months vacation. I need to find myself. Probably going back to my own country. Just learn how to enjoy life, attend workshops, get to know new city area, meet new people, do some interesting hobbies. Maybe do a little freelance (max 10hrs a week).

Im tired of feeling like I need to make as much money as I can and learn as much about my work as I can. Its not rewarding because its never enough.

Whats the point in that money if I cant enjoy it?

The worst boss and human being so far, still wondering how he keeps the company afloat. This was my first longterm developer job almost a decade ago and I was a student at that time. The application was an outlook plug in for a document management system.

Scene 1:
Boss: The processing is too slow. Make it faster.
Me: After analysis and profiling I can prove that the core (developed in VB6 by a physicist and autoconverted to VB.NET) is the bottleneck.
Boss: I don't care. Make it faster and don't touch the core.

Scene 2:
Boss: I want the app to behave in that way.
Me: This is not what we specified previously. Look here. Nonetheless, I would have to rewrite half of the plugin. Mind that it is an outlook plug in and we are restricted by outlook. If you want that, it would take XX days and we do not have enough time until release.
Boss: I don't care. Do it. And the deadline stays as it is.
Boss 2 weeks later: I don't like it.

Scene 3:
Me: To release in time I need more resources. I need at least one tester and another developer would be a huge plus. Also, I need a second PC for testing.
Boss: No.
2 weeks later:
Boss: why does it not work properly in outlook 2010? Didn't you test it?
Me: I could not. I have only outlook 2007. I asked for more resources and did not get them.
Boss: it's your fault. Bad work.

Scene 4:
*Me having failed multiple exams, stress at work, started to drink*
Boss: Don't you like working here?
Me: ...

Finale:
*Me getting written sick with severe depression*
Boss: fires me.
Me: Loses flat. Quits uni. Unemployed for 6 Months, one rejection after another (boss was phoned, that's sure). Moving back to parents. Sues boss. Gets money.

I still hate him and wish him the most painful experiences in life. Such people belong behind bars. But the justice isn't always served. One has to move forward and improve himself.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

When I wasn’t the lead yet there are so many things I want to do and improve. I have asked and judged my lead’s choices a thousand times for choosing the easy and fast way instead of the right way.

Now that he left and his role was given to me, I can now sense the same judgements from my members to the decisions I make (or not make).
I now understand. We don’t always have the luxury of time. If I say yes to improving everything at once then our app will never be done. (That our bosses will blame me for)

I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.

Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.

So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.

How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.

Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.

! exactly dev

I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.

As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.

To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(

As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.

Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.

Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.

Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.

So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).

Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.

Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.

I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.

I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.

When your home's infrastructure runs better and is more stable than some of the shit that's actually running enterprises because you actually do care about industry best practices and product quality.. it's a weird feeling. A very disappointing one, if anything.

Post-meritocracy, it very much seems to be a thing. And when you call people out for it because yes I do want to *be* the change that I want to see, they get all defensive and shun you. Yeah, let's make the world burn in inefficient, dysfunctional bullshit. That's a much better idea.

Are we humans really that far apart from the chimps that we descended from?

Worst part of it all, those incompetent bastards that can't possibly admit and work to improve their mistakes are the ones that are behind the companies' steering wheel. That too is such an excellent idea. I bet that half of them got employed only because they took the lowest wage and could (barely) turn on a computer. Fucking morons...

TL;DR: a dude thinks good graphics make a game good.

so every day when the school ends, me, a dude and another girl walk home. as expected we have lots of time to talk about anything. I wanted that day to tell that dude about what I am going to buy on steam summer sales with just 15$.

me: I am going for this summer to play lots of games so I saved some money for this summer sale. do you want to hear what awesome games I am about to buy with just 15$?
dude: yeah, sure thing.

he wasn't expecting much

M: this summer I am going to buy 5 games and maybe keep more for some others. they are so awesome!
D: ok, let's hear those 'awesome' games!
M: the first game is devil daggers, maybe you don't kno...
D: of course I do. is that game
M: I want to get that game just to improve my aim, but maybe I will have some fun.
D: yeah yeah, I know that game
M: *poker face*

I KNEW he doesn't know this game and anything about pc games because of the followings...

M: ok then... I also want to get Half-Life 2 : Episode 1 & 2. they have pretty rich story and I already have both Half-Lives.
D: holy shit but the graphics... ok, one more 'awesome' game of yours.
M: there are 2 episodes, 2 separate games. I really don't care about the graphics, I love the story.
D: continue with your 'awesom' games...

that dude didn't even knew about half-life and said that game is bad.

M: another game I want to get is Battlefront 2, the one from 2005 and...
D: 2005!?
M: yeah, the new one sucks, and the gameplay in the original is way better and...
D: *starts laughing* 2005!? I thought you were getting the new one. I imagine the graphics being like this car. *points to a fucking car, yeah that kind of comparasion, I know*

after this I was so fucking pissed off. he doesn't even know about some cult classics that are meant to be played. he doesn't even have a pc nor console and he is stating his opinion on fine air for fucks sake!

M: ok, what about getting the facts and then make an opinon.
D: yeah yeah *making fun of me at that point*

I didn't tell him that I wanted to buy the binding of isaac, cause it was enough for me. I told him to watch some reviews on these games and blog posts about them and I am sure tomorrow he will say that he 'wathced' the reviews and that those games are garbage. it's his style to underestimate things. I fucking hate him, not becuase of the games, but because he underestimates everything that is not on his list of 'good games'. that list consists of new games with great graphics(3D only).

sorry if I exaggerate saying that those games are cult classics but I really look forward into buying them.

if you have another indie game to run on this potato machine(2gb ram, pentium dual-core 2.1ghz, gtx 525m) that I should or at least try comment, I am open to suggestions!

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

Knowing the way you should be treated a super power. I am seeing a lot difference in my previous and the current manager. Ex-manager thought that we are robots and we work strictly 8 hours, if some problem came during the project execution, he asked questions which felt like I am answerable to unknowns and felt like that I am being blamed.
My new manager, whenever any problem comes, she takes it as a challange, she tries to solve it. There are quirks too but I feel a lot freedom now.
My anxiety is gone. I am only stressed sometimes which is a big upgrade for me.
I know better now that how I want to be treated, I am a person. Have feelings and yes I'm not perfect so lack basic things but I'm willing to improve.

Well, this is a rant about devRant! Sorry.
I like devRant, especially when my internet connection is fast. But when it is not, it is very annoying to wait for a rant to load whenever I click [read more]. I found myself skipping interesting rants that I want to read just coz I don't wanna be waiting doing nothing during the loading screen!
Suggestions for how to improve this:
- Just like facebook and devRant web app, Increase the limit of the text that loaded when loading the rants feed. Not all of it has to be visible in the feed, but when clicking read more, show the rest so I can continue reading the rant while the comments are loaded.
- If not, then like youtube, load the whole rant first from the server when clicking read more before loading the comments.
- (Even for short rants) when clicking on a rant, show the loaded text while fetching the rest of the rant. This way I can at least click the rant, and continue reading till the rest of it (or comments) is loaded.

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

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

tl : "hey dotenv, we have a presentation with VP tomorrow, do you want to present any of your achievements in product?"

me: "umm, what achievements ?"

tl : "you know, something that you added in app which made a good impact to various metrics like DAU, MAU, less bad reviews etc"

me: "umm... i coded the tasks and features created by you folks. they got shipped at some point of your liking, and are now being tracked by you for its success failure. So i am not sure what to take credit for"

TL: "no, no.. i mean like any bugs or issues that you fixed outside of your daily jira tasks which you tracked to be a sucess"

me: "well as far as tracking is concerned, then neither i know how to track them nor i did. but yea, i identified a bug where an outdated payload was generating bad request and giving a silent failure instead of success which recently got shipped. maybe its helping users get actual response instead of "we will get back to you in some time" , so this might get considered?

TL : "oh that? that we have already added as one of the team's achievements (=PM+TL's achievement) and have tracked it to be a succes"

me : "what th- okay. then how about that api failure which was identified by AVP as "something is not right" in which the api was intermittently taking a long time to respond. he tagged me and i set up logs to identify which type of users got that issue and the actual cause of that api failure. that was definitely a good fox for app as we ended up with good reviews on playstore for our new release?"

TL : "oh that? how can you take credit for that fix? it was identified by AVP, you just added similar logs that we were using for tracking errors and implemented a fix when it came to you as a sprint task? its a team achievement"

me : "but you guys didn't identified the cause through your logs!? my log was more granular. and even if that's the case, we aren't allowed to pick any task just as is, without getting it added to sprint , right?"

TL : "nah, that was a team win"

*6 months later, during appraisal time"
TL : "Hey dotenv, you haven't displayed any leadership skills and haven't gone put of the box to improve the product. Here's your peanut appraisal 🗑️"

me : 🥲🔫🤯🪦

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

fuck this stupid neaurocrst structure. i hate being a selfish prick than a team player, but either give credits as well as punishment to the team or gove credits as well as punishment to the single person. but wtf is thos culture of giving reward to team and punishment to individual? fckin communists

------

So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.

I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.

Here's my problems with this place:

1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.

2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.

3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.

4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.

5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.

6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.

7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.

8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.

9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.

10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.

11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.

Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.

My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.

I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

Joined a new team at work 6 months ago. Immediately set upon by a useless PO who was somehow set in her ways while still being around 30 years old. Absolutely refused to change the broken team dynamic or processes in any way whatsoever. Made terrible tickets, never did refinement on tickets so they were always missing stuff and constantly blocked. Generally unlikeable and difficult to work with, incompetent at her job and resolutely refused to change literally anything to make the team function better.

She finally leaves after 6 months and the team dynamic changes immediately. Suddenly we are improving our processes, getting stakeholder input, refining tickets, taking reasonable amounts of work in a sprint. We have discussions without her butting in and getting frustrated when you bring up legitimate concerns. No longer do you have to tiptoe around and appease her ego if you want to point out the obvious flaws in the work she drew up or even just examine it from a technical perspective.

It's insane how much things can improve once you shed the dead weight of people that are just determined to be difficult and won't budge an inch to change their ways. Good riddance.

Imagine asking your friends to help you rate your app on the google play store and instead of saying NO I DONT WANT TO RATE YOUR APPLICATION no... they decide to fuck with your mind.

1)
I will rate it tomorrow. (she never rated it tomorrow nor the next couple of weeks later)

2)
I will keep it in mind and rate it later :). (she never rated it later)

3)
I rated it haha (less than 30 seconds later they deleted the rating)

4)
Send me a link and I'll rate it (i send the link, they never respond or read my message again)

5)
I dont have memory on my phone :) (because 13MB of memory is a lot of storage requirements but taking 1 million selfies of up to 25GB is completely fine)

6)
I dont have memory on my phone what dont you understand :) x2 (this is the second girl)

7)
Your trying to give me a virus?? No (i got blocked multiple times)

8)
You want to hack me by making me install this application from the link that you sent me that leads to google play store? No (blocked)

9)
Rate your app? Haha i dont care about it because it doesnt bring me any benefit only the fat cocks that fill my pussy up satisfy me and not ur app haha

10)
Haha send me a link ill rate it (i send link, 8 hours later no reply or reading my message, i text her back if she had done it and im still put on ignore)

...

N)
more

----

Notice how none of these people have said the 2 letter word: "no".

All of these 10 examples are based on a true story.

All of these 10 examples are different people.

---

How hard
Can it be
To just
Write

no

---

.

---

For all of you who are about to trash talk saying i am desperately trying to beg people to rate my app:

i know all of those people for a long time. But when it comes to asking (and not forcing) someone to do you a favor for free that takes no more than 30 seconds, no one seems to have 30 seconds of their free time. Dont get me wrong, some of my friends did politely rate it and left a review, even the people who i barely knew left a review and rated it, but the people with whom I was closer by, didnt.

---

In the beginning i used to not care about this at all. Then i started falling into depression because of it. I fell then into deep depression. Then i sunk so deep that i couldn't feel any emotions anymore so i laughed as an anti depressive mechanism whenever something depressing happened. Now i cant even laugh because i have no more energy. Now i actually leave man tears

---

The only thing more valuable than people, any materialistic thing, animals, coding and even money - is time....

----

why do you waste my time

if i ask you to do something that takes 30 seconds and you dont want to do it

why cant you just say no

why do you drag me

why do you say you're going to do it when you know you wont do it

what do you gain by unnecessarily lying to someone for such a small thing?

to someone who has been a good person to you?

do you feel superior?

is your ego bigger?

----

This experience has taught me that not even a human from the same blood can be trusted.

All of your are fucked up in the head in your own style and i am guilty of it too, all of us are.

But i have never seen the human evolution went from simplicity to overengineered complexitory bULLSHit where you have to lie to someone and waste hours, days, weeks, months and sometimes years of his time just because you dont want to say a 2 letter word, no.

But when that person becomes more successful than you and achieves higher status, Theen you have those 30 seconds of free time. All of you are fucking cynics. and i am so much overly disgusted by all of this fucking bullshit....

-----

This experience has proven to me to simply focus on investing into myself and learn and improve myself and no one else. To not even bother asking even for a small kind of help, a feedback from my work because people don't have 30 seconds of their free time. That is all.

Find what you want to build. Watch some videos. Code. Grab some books. Code. Find some friends to code. Code.
And learn some theory to improve your code. Code.

Get a job. Code. Get paid.

If you are a web developer, consider using proper page titles.

Page titles are one of the most basic elements of a web page and yet websites often fail to make proper use of them.

Without a proper page title, your user does not have an accurate idea of what page is in the tab without having to open the tab, which gets tedious if many tabs are open. With a proper page title, an instant glance on the tab does suffice.

Some sites only put in their site name or something like "Search - Site Name" without including the search query in the page title, or "User profile - Site Name".

An example of this is, disappointingly, archive.org. As thankful as I am for the Archive, they could make better use of page titles to make browsing their library more convenient. While they use proper page titles on item pages (including both title and author!), they use non-descriptive titles on their 2023 search feature (downgraded from lightweight static HTML+AJAX to a JavaScript app) and user profile pages.

The user name of a profile or a search query and ideally a page number should be in the page title so a browser tab with a search can be found faster and can also be seen on social media sites that auto-generate preview cards with page titles.

Descriptive page titles also improve your search engine ranking! You surely don't want to miss out on that, do you?

The first thing that matters to me for applying for a job is how their project that I am going to work on will improve me. I have refused a job position with a higher salary just because they want me as their only developers for their website and other things. Instead, I applied for another job with lower salary but now I am a backend developer of a team of 15 developers making a great product and I have learned many experiences.

im watching Zuckerbergs hearing in the eupa right now and i already want to punch Zuckerbergs face for his promisses to improve Facebook that should be standard in the first place.

All this started around an year back. In college we had this subject of web programming where we were given a mini project to do. The topics were given related to college stuff. Mine was an attendance system. Made a simple website using all i knew about bootstrap, jquery, etc since i had some previous experience with web. The professor liked it and asked me to further improve it so that it can actually be implemented. This was six months back.

Since that day, to this date, that guy asks me to add a new feature or just modify something every two weeks. These guys just want free work and think everyone is just free. Neither does he help a bit... just demands... god knows when this forever loop would end! It has become frustrating now...it just feels as though why i showed my skills in the first place 😐😖

First week at job as newly graduated from CompSci. And I feel like a fucking monkey trying to figure out how everything works, I have help from the main developer but it feels like I have to ask questions all the time and I can feel the judgement in his voice. Today I committed my first lines of code (phoneformatting) and he basically had to hold my hand the whole way through. I feel like shit atm, I really want to be good at this, I watch tutorials but when it comes down to it my mind just blanks out and I can't figure out how to even write a simple fucking method in php (which he did and my brain just shut down ). Please help me, how do I improve at remembering all these terminologies, I feel like if I keep it up like this they won't have me around for long.

I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

When you get a summer job at the university to improve internal tools and asking your guarantor why the crappyness of his code is evident even to a noob pythonista like me and getting the answer like "I'm writing this only until it does what I want" kinda frustrates and demotivates. I'm sure this is NOT how things should be done.

Microservices is a buzzword and everyone is using it to modernize their company and themselves.

Add a cloud in the context and boom, you are equivalent of some Tech gaint.

Well then, if you say so why don't you implement or try to implement in proper way. Use the right tools, "opensource" if you have heard of it has a ton of stuff right for the job.

But no, all you do is write the same old services in Java, put a label of "cloud native" and stick it out so proudly that clients think "oh a new shiny thing".

Putting out poster of "Immediate job requiment for Microservices" and staring blank when the candidate tries to explain how the Microservices work, but you know only about EJBs and you are sitting in interview room wondering what he is really talking about. I dint hear a single word of Java because that is all I know. Then finally rejecting the candidate because he dint say EJB in the interview.

The point is, some shit people don't want to improve themselves nor let anyone improve. Fear of being replaced by a younger generation of developers has plauged the seniors in ways no one can think of.

What the actual f. I just changed my password on uplay to a 30 character password which works fine on the web account manager. Apparantly some moron decided to limit password field in the uplay client where your actual games are stored to 17 or 18 characters.

And that while they want to "improve" security. Please ubisoft, fix your shit

I want to improve my workflow by perpetually ignoring all meetings and emails. Just let me work!

At first my dad was against it, I'm studying electronics engineering and he didn't want me to code because he is a software developer and he know that in my country it's really hard to make a living out of it. But since he realized that there is not much he can do about it he became really supportive and always review my code to help me improve it.

These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.

You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?

Well maybe it's for good.

Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"

It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".

Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?

oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?

yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.

and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.

but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.

and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"

short minded idiots.

I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.

It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)

But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.

In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.

I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.

Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.

I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.

At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.

But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.

I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.

What in the actual fuck.

I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.

So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.

I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).

Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.

So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.

Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.

I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.

When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).

Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.

Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.

do you guys think it's dangerous territory to do something you weren't asked to do at work?

like, i know i can improve some minor inconveniences, but they are not the priority. on the other hand, we always have a bigger problem and the little stuff gets left behind. idk, i just want to leave things better than i found them

So, as I'm currently cut off from the world of tech, my anxiety in regards to research has settled and I actually enjoy doing it again on my terms. It just makes me jealous to look at all these people developing cool stuff and wanting to get in on the project and maybe improve a part or two, particularly the robot kind. I want to slap some neural nets on majority of the robotic shit I see, or optimize them, or do something to make them more robust... But I don't have a research position right now where I can spend time and money doing that. So I just sit in front of my laptop and sulk.

... And literally this is why we can't have nice things. Cuz I'm not hired to make nice things. Literally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 hour meeting to brainstorm ideas to improve our system health monitoring (logging, alerting, monitoring, and metrics)

Never got past the alerting part. Piss poor excuses for human being managers kept 'blaming' our logging infrastructure for allowing them to log exceptions as 'Warnings', purposely by-passing the alerting system.

Then the d-head tried to 'educate' everyone the difference between error and exception …frack-wad…the difference isn't philosophical…shut up.

The B manager kept referring to our old logging system (like we stopped using it 5 years ago) and if it were written correctly, the legacy code would be easier to migrate. Fracking lying B….shut the frack up.

The fracking idiots then wanted to add direct-bypass of the alerting system (I purposely made the code to bypass alerting painful to write)

Mgr1: "The only way this will work is if you, by default, allow errors to bypass the alerting system. When all of our code is migrated, we'll change a config or something to enable alerting. That shouldn't be too hard."
Me: "Not going to happen. I made by-passing the alert system painful on purpose. If I make it easy, you'll never go back and change code."
Mgr2: "Oh, yes we will. Just mark that method as obsolete. That way, it will force us to fix the code."
Me: "The by-pass method is already obsolete and the teams are already ignoring the build warnings."
Mgr1: "No, that is not correct. We have a process to fix all build warnings related to obsolete methods."
Mgr2: "Yes. It won't be like the old system. We just never had time to go back and fix that code."
Me: "The method has been obsolete for almost a year. If your teams haven't fixed their code by now, it's not going to be fixed."
Mgr1: "You're expecting everything to be changed in one day. Our code base is way too big and there are too many changes to make. All we are asking for is a simple change that will give us the time we need to make the system better. We all want to make the system better…right?"
Me: "We made the changes to the core system over two years ago, and we had this same conversation, remember? If your team hasn't made any changes by now, they aren't going to. The only way they will change code to the new standard is if we make the old way painful. Sorry, that's the truth."
Mgr2: "Why did we make changes to the logging system? Why weren't any of us involved? If there were going to be all these changes, our team should have been part of the process."
Me: "You were and declined every meeting and every attempt to include your area. Considering the massive amount of infrastructure changes there was zero code changes required by your team. The new system simply worked. You can't take advantage of the new features which is why we're here today. I'm here to offer my help in any way I can with the transition."
Mgr1: "The new logging doesn't support logging of the different web page areas. Until you can make that change, we can't begin changing our code."
Me: "Logging properties is just a name+value pair dictionary. All you need to do is standardize on a name and how you add it to the collection."
Mgr2: "So, it's not a standard field? How difficult would it be to change the core assembly? This has to be standard across all our areas and shouldn't be up to the developers to type in anything they want."
- Frack wads smile and nod to each other like fracking chickens in a feeding frenzy
Me: "It can, but what will you call this property? What controls its value?"
- The look I got from both the d-bags I could tell a blood vessel popped.
Mgr1: "Oh…um….I don't know…Area? Yea … Area."
Mgr2: "Um…that's not specific enough. How about Page?"
Mgr1: "Well, pages can cross different areas, and areas cross different pages…what do you think?"
Me: "Don't know, don't care. It's up to you. I just need a name."
Mgr2: "Modules! Our MVC framework is broken up in Modules."
DevMgr: "We already have a field for Module. It's how we're segmenting the different business processes"
Mgr1: "Doesn't matter, we'll come up with a name later. Until then, we won't make any changes until there is a name."
DevMgr: "So what did we accomplish?"
Me: "That we need to review the web's logging and alerting process and make sure we're capturing errors being hidden as warnings."
Mgr1: "Nooo….we didn't accomplish anything. This meeting had no agenda and no purpose. We should have been included in the logging process changes from day one."
Mgr2: "I agree, I'm not sure why we're here"
Me: "This was a brainstorming meeting as listed in the agenda. We've accomplished 2 of the 4 items. I think we've established your commitment to making the system better. Thank you all for coming."

- Mgr1 and 2 left without looking at me or saying a word.

This is a story about my disappointment in modern GUI editors for desktop applications.

Well, first of all, I grew up with Delphi 5. Delphi has an awesome form editor. It's intuitive and works without any problem. It always does what you want it to do. Prototyping is really a problem of seconds here, even for people that never used it (I guess).

But the problem is that it is Delphi. Its so old, bloated, and most problems you'll ever have have been solved (through a hack) 20 years ago in some weird forum.

So I looked on and tried many other drag'n'drop gui editors.

The one for java is the biggest pile of crap I've ever seen. It slows down eclipse /intellij and does almost never do what I want. At least its not really intuitive.

Right after that, the one for C# (this xml Designer ) is okay-ish, but it's also not really intuitive and does not always what the user wants.

I also tried other ones. But I still miss an intuitive one that works without weird side effects.

I now can understand why the Web dev stack grows in the region of desktop apps. I can prototype stuff even faster in angular than in Delphi.
But shouldn't we improve the desktop stack instead of taking some bloated stack using a language that should have never existed?

This year I want to become a better programmer. I ordered the book clean code and want to focus on writing more and better unit tests.

If anyone has any tips on how to improve or how to get tips on your code

How do you prove yourself?

I'm an iOS developer and I've been developing apps for a year or two now and I don't see anything hard in it I just think it's knowing how to wire things up and avoid common bugs I've also worked on a couple of complex apps and the idea is just the same.

I want to know if I really want to prove myself well (to myself) how can I do that and how can I challenge myself more to improve.

Ps: I'm by no way an expert and I know I've got a big road ahead of me but I just want advise to improve more in the right direction

Business logic:

Meeting starts at 9:45 AM. They only really wanna talk about the features they have on the horizon and how innovative and distruptive and rich we'll be. We spend 10, maybe 15 minutes talking about UI and details of the feaure. The meeting ends a few minutes before 12, so that's 2 hours of lunch (I wanna respect the schedules we had pre-covid to keep that rhythm). I start working again at 2 PM, but 15 minutes later, I get called again by one of the managers to hear more about this new great new idea they have.

So I work about 7-9 hours a day. But HR and management want to spend 3 of those hours. Suggestion: we'd improve our productivity by about 35% if we cut those daily meetings.

My boss keeps pushing me to do „any“ courses..
I’d say I’m doing my job exceptionally well. In fact he even told me before he promoted me.

I had to tell him what I wanna learn in the next 2-3 years. I told him I wanna be decent in C++ because i love the language and in my opinion every dev can improve by learning a low level language.

Have some MITx courses and stuff I wanna do (I actually want to do them) but he keeps pushing me to send him the courses so he can push me and (I think) Monitor my progress..

C/Cpp and asm have always been my love, I wanna improve and learn. But I wanna do it for myself, not for my boss. The company doesn’t have any use for it anyway..

And those courses are 4 weeks to 12 months with scheduled assessments.

I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Now it’s an expectation they have.

Now I have to force myself into doing those courses in time.. on a schedule..?

90% of then will bore the shit out of me cause I already know it and the remaining 10% are stuff I wanna look at when I feel like it. But I don’t have a paper that says I know those 90% so yeah..

Why can’t he just be happy with the work I do during working hours and leave my free time up to me???

All i want to do is write code. Give me time, space, and stop bothering me so often and I can fix the shitty outsourced code. I can do it, really. I can write a ton of resdesign docs and improve so much shit. But I can't do ANY OF IT BECAUSE THESE FUCKS ARE ALWAYS PAWNING OFF WORK ONTO ME AND REFUSING TO LET ME GET MY HANDS DIRTY.

Stop asking me to email people. Stop asking me to update documentation that isn't for my features. Stop bothering me. Stop. Fucking. Bothering. Me. All. The. Goddamn. Damn.

Stop it stop it stop it fucking stop. I don't care about the PM's dumbfuck braindead statements and always wanting to pick a fight with me. I don't care that x environment is down. I don't care that your shitty overseas programmers can't tell their own ass from their head. I do care that I have the skills to fix it if you would give me the fucking time and space.

Instead of having me do all the mundane tasks that your shitty ape programmers could do overseas, let me have some fucking room to breath and I can fix this shitty fuck of a project and Maybe I can save it before it collapses on itself you dumb fucks

Holy shit im pissy today

Not really trying to, but probably should try to fix this bad, bad habit…

I keep wanting to fix and improve everything - and I keep taking notes, writing action plans et fucking cetera to the point the amount of work that should be done and I want to do is driving me insane. And they should all get done now!

In short, I should really either learn to focus on just one thing at a time for a meaningful period - or just cease to give a fuck. Either could work.

Is it just me or is it really fuckin amazing when ur teacher tells you after a year that you are a better programmer than he is 😒 even tho ur just a beginner?

I just started learning to code and i was already better at it than the person who is supposed to teach me... which is great if you ask me #sarcasm

And when we finish a simple task on if statements - which he thought was gonna take us a whole hour - in like 5 minutes, he doesnt let us work on our own programs: "Can you close that? Its not related to the lesson"
Ffs man! 😤 Am i supposed to sit here for an hour just staring into the void, doing fuck all, while i could actually improve my skills?

Then you go home and learn more in two hours than you'll ever do throughout the following 3 years in school.... 😧

If this is not a complete waste of time then i have no fucking clue what is.

GCSE Computer Science sucks (at least in my school). Is there anyone out there with similar issues or is it just our lucky bunch?

My advice to young/beginner programmers:
If you really want to learn, please just google what ur interested in and use stackoverflow

(I highly recommend to you to not read this, it's just something that I had been wanting to take off my head; seriously, if you want to read it, do it at your own risk, because it will be a huge waste of your time)

Oracle Academy is the worst crappy attempt from a Corporation to create a learning platform.

The directive and academic personnel of my faculty decided that it could be a good idea to teach SQL and PL/SQL during whatever online classes will last with Oracle Academy, and I truly strongly believe (including most of my friends and classmates) that it's one of the worst ideas that could be done.

At that platform you simply don't learn shit, you read page by page of shitty PPT-like PDF presentations (that most of those are from a decade ago and other from 5 years ago) that are a pain in the ass to read due to how poorly formatted they are or how it explains badly certain concepts due to how badly made some explaining examples are, and then at each section of the "Learning Course" I have to do a Quiz that asks theorical questions and tells you to make certain code reviews to see if something is wrong or not (also which they are just alike the presentations, poorly formatted, up to the point that those have many syntax errors that end up consufing anyone a lot) and the main problem with the quizes is that also the Oracle's PL/SQL Docs are so fucking badly made, that I have to check PDF by PDF and page by page the concept that I just forgot to see how to answer the goddamn question; I mean, there are Doc pages that are way better structured and obviusly external to Oracle, but not even those pages fully cover certain SQL and PL/SQL concepts.

Seriously though, who could be so fucking ill-minded to create a shittyful learning platform and not try to fucking improve nor enhance it at least every 2 fucking years, so the goddamn "learning" process isn't that stressful.

!dev
At my current work (sports wear bla bla bla) we recently had couple of brands come by (136people) and had a presentation. One of the market lead peps stood and talked about future plans and projects in the following:

👨🏻‍💼MarketGuy: "we want to improve the e-shop service and direct booking system. Think about it, AI, machine learning and deep network, these are all out there and we should consider working with it!"

👨🏻Me: ... *Thinking* "buzzwords, buzzwords everywhere.. dude you don't even know how to excel..

👨🏻‍💼: *Continues babbling about website, Blockchain and AI together with sportswear and the future of working together*

MAH GAAAD (┛◉Д◉)┛彡┻━┻
I need a coffee.. ☕

"In a sentence: Technically brilliant, delightful to work with, combined with a self-awareness and strong desire to improve. We also want to make sure everyone is highly supportive of each other; we win as a team."

In short: you're looking for a unicorn, which your company won't be.

Guy really said he wants the charisma of Steve Jobs and the technical genius of Wozniak...

are people really this stupid?

I don't know if this is exactly a rant. But - I am sure somewhere out there has run into this situation before.

I've been a developer (professionally) for a 3 years. And in that time I've stayed with that same company.

Over that time its become incredibly apparent that my boss (senior developer) isn't exactly keen on new technologies, source control (I had to push hard for this. And even then he doesn't use it properly), or any kind of project management. It's only he and I.

I've started interviewing other places and while I have no problems answering their technical questions. I'm worried my lack of experience in a team is becoming a problem.

We don't work on projects together. We don't do code reviews. He does not ask my opinion on anything. We are basically two separate teams. I want to improve as a developer. I love the rest of the company and I enjoy what I'm working on. I just feel I'm hindering my growth as a developer.

Anyone have any advice? I know I can find a project to contribute to on github or something. But honestly that's intimidating to me for some reason. I am self taught. And don't have any experience in working with teams.

A couple nights ago I was thinking how can absurdly incompetent programmers exist out there (based on stories I read here), and I think I know the reason. They just don't like doing it, to them it's just a job. They get into the building, work and go home. They learned programming in college but probably never wrote anything for fun. Because of that they don't dedicate themselves to learning new tech, don't try to improve and be good at the job, all they want is the money to be able to survive and that's it. Since they don't have the curiosity to drive them forward, they just don't and keep writing shitty code.

I'm not saying you need to have a bazillion side-projects, work an 8h shift and then go home and spend 3h on personal projects, or that you have to breathe programming and tech. All I'm saying is that, to be competent and good (this probably applies to most jobs) you have to like what you do and have at least some interest in it.

How do you feel with not having motivation to work on/finish your personal projects?

I'm working 9 to 5 plus commute and at the end of the day I just want to eat some food and chill. But I keep beating myself up over not working on things that will improve myself.

Does anyone else feel like this while working full time?

I'm working on a codebase that is terminally ill. It's split so badly into microservices that no matter what you do, every one of them talks to every one of them over and over. If there's any way they can avoid just invoking a method on a class and send themselves a message or make an HTTP request, they'll do it. One of the services just sends messages to itself for no apparent reason. Except it doesn't even send messages to itself. It sends an HTTP request to a controller in another app, and that controller sends a message which is received by the same class that made the request.

The point is that this application is screwed. The defects pile up and there is literally no one who can understand what it's supposed to do in any scenario. I'm good at this. I can follow confusing code and document it. But not this one. It's overwhelming. It's insanity.

When these defects come in we're told to just run the app from the UI, see what HTTP requests it makes, and start tracing the code manually. Running and debugging it locally would be a nightmare but it's impossible anyway.

They decided that we all need to understand the application better so we can work on it, so we were each given six poorly-define five-hour tasks to "understand" various things. Those things don't make any sense. It's like if someone gave you the source code to Excel and told you to spent five hours understanding columns, five more understanding rows, and five more understanding cells.

Here's the thing: I'm okay with learning and understanding some code. It's part of the job. But I'm not going to abandon my career as a software developer so I can become an expert on debugging their awful code. I didn't make this mess. I'm not going to live with it. I'm moving on as quickly as I possibly can.

I've tried to explain to them that if they want the situation to improve they need to improve the code. They need to learn how to write tests. If your plan is that people will study your code, know it inside and out, and then spend all their time debugging it, that's a plan for failure. Everyone who can will leave and take what they know with them.

These companies just don't get it. They need their software to work, but the types of developers who can help them don't need that software to work. No one capable of doing good work is going to spend several years debugging their awful code unless you pay them a crazy ton of money.

Just don't make a mess in the first place. Hire developers who can do a good job. If you hire the cheapest people you can find you won't be able to get someone else to fix it later. It's not personal but I wish failure on those projects or even those companies. I want them to fail because failure is so expensive. I want them to fail so that others learn from it and don't repeat the same mistakes.

As an industry we're a bunch of genuine idiots. We just keep doing the same things over and over again no matter how much it hurts.

Sooooo... I've felt a bit lost during my years as a student and maybe this is a nice place to finally talk about it.
I've had my first programming experiences in school (back then it was delphi, a Pascal variant), then decided after graduating I want to study computer science. I've stuck with it and will finish my masters degree in a few months. (Took me a year longer than the university plans but will likely have a very good grade)

Since i have little programming experience and never coded anything useful (mostly study projects or simple programming tasks) I've always been struggling with depressions, worries of being not good enough and never finding a job etc pp, but in the last few months it got worse since I NEED to apply for jobs now as i graduate next may. I'd really like to improve and found some "learn how to code" websites but the progress seems still slow and meaningless when I compare myself to all those guys out there:
- those comparing several hardware/software pieces casually since they know all the (dis)advantages and specs off by heart
- those who have fierce discussions about languages, libraries, runtimes etc
- those who solve the problems in coding websites with 3 lines and incredibly mathematicsl proofs for why this shortcut works (fastest)
- basically the guys who discuss so many things i've never even heard of

I just feel so lost, useless and like i missed years of learning things everybody else just obviously knows now. Is there any way to catch up? I thought about trying to join a local Chaos Computer Club but they sound like they wouldn't be fond of a noob like me.

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

I need to get this out there because you guys and gals are honestly the only people I can vent this to.

I’m working on a program for fun that’ll transfer files over sockets. Nothing too special. But this project is just boring me. I’m not getting any motivation even when I’m getting started. Which didn’t happen last project.

I have a general idea how I’m going to do it but I just can’t sit down and do it because I start overthinking about everything. Like how am I going to do this or that. How am I going to handle feature a, feature b, etc. And I’m just getting a headache and I’m not writing code and I’m JUST FUCKING STARING LIKE AN IDIOT. I don’t even know why it’s not inspiring me because I’ve always wanted to program a file transferring application of some kind and I still do.

I keep doing a bunch of small patches when I work on it and they work and improve it but I am hard on myself because it’s not one big feature or I didn’t work on it for hours. I’m always so fucking hard on myself fuck.

I want to do so much other stuff but I just wanna tough it on through and finish but it’s so uninspired because I don’t even feel like what the final product will feel like others. Like any service that involves transferring files I feel like they don’t function like how I’m thinking they do like I’m trying to make this function.

I feel like everything I’m making is just subpar and not good and I’m trying and I’m trying to improve but I feel like I’m not getting anywhere. And I want to learn a lot of stuff I have shit planned but I can’t get to it because I have to go through uninspired bullshit hell.

Idk

Our company hired a "Human resource consulting" to help with our internal processes and policies. Yesterday they showed us an Excel that we should fill when we travel to attend meetings, events, courses, etc.

This spreadsheet... OH, THIS SPREADSHEET... you should've seen that.

Most of the "labels" of the "fields" were writen with terms that we do not use in our daily basis. The fields were ambiguous. You shout put a number on the Transportation quantity (ex.: 5) but have no space to describe which transport you will use (bus, metro, uber... so... 5 what?). When we asked which name shoud go on the field "superior" (director, pm, scrum master...) the woman from this consulting said "oh, I don't believe you're asking about this" (and since then, she became more rude by the end of the meeting).

We care for quality in our apps, and UI/UX is a big thing in our company. The last thing we want is need to read a f*#1n manual to fill a spreadsheet. Make it intuitive and you will not need an hour and a half to explain how to fill this obsolete form.

It's sad to think that this person was hired to improve our company, but did not bother to understand the company's culture (and values, and terms) first.

I begin with the optimism and the joy that I am creating something new that will improve people's lives.

I listen to the user and analyze the current process in depth.

I try to suggest additional value to the system for the users consideration. Sometimes they do not realize we can improve 10x rather than 2x.

I learn what the users goals are and what they want out of the system. We think about reports and downstream value. Sort of working from the end to the beginning (data ingests and upstream processes that will feed the system).

After the user signs off on the requirements and deliverables and I have a realistic project plan I begin to code.

It works and has worked for me every time for a long long time.

Why is so hard to find engineers that actually care? It feels like the majority of people always want to do the bear minimum, no one wants to fix their shitty code even when it clearly violates the project or company standards. Everyone constantly comes up with shit about why they can't do things properly or how they'll fix it later and then get their mates to push their shit through review. The majority of lower management usually care equally as little so there's no point explaining the situation to them and the lack of care probably goes much higher. It seems like so many people go from job to job getting bump after bump in salary, which granted is absolutely fine and probably advised, but have nothing to show for it. Usually very little skills but alleged mountains of experience and a lazy piece of shit attitude. I hear all the time people saying you'll never change anything so why try and it feels like that most of the time but more because everyone keeps saying it. If everyone pulled their fingers out their arse, maybe we would stand a chance. I'm sure a lot of people on here have a real passion for computer science, whichever division you're in and love to learn and improve and reflect. What I really want to know is how you deal with people who are just taking their paycheck and enjoying the ride but don't actually care and how you discover these people as early on as possible to get shot of them.

My org (of which i'm basically CTO) has this administrative tool that a team uses to combat spam and scams, which is quite the problem for us.. the tool was written like 9 years ago, by my predecessor, very quick & dirty and unaesthetic and without input from those who would use it as far as interface or UX... it got modded a little a few years later by a kind of amateur coder who was at the time on the spam control team, and now there's this new maybe slightly less amateur coder guy on the team who has written this amateur tool that scrapes data off our site and massages it and stores it on his own server and then provides a better interface, or so they say.... this is all because for a couple of years people didnt want to "bother me" with a request to improve our internal tool, they thought I was "too busy" doing other things... so instead this outsider has built this stupid thing that lives on his own personal server and so now we have these problems to do with performance, security, privacy for user info, etc etc... someone please shoot me....

have a couple friends now who have gotten dev jobs at microsoft. I've since turned down their offers to apply and have them vouch for me twice now - not sure if their recommendations would mean anything to begin with at such a place.

this has gotten me a lot of criticism from peers and mentors who have chided me for "throwing away a golden ticket" on my resume.

at first I declined because I sure as fuck did not believe I had the skills to last very long there - and truth is I probably still don't.

but now I see it as a case of the cliche "corporate devil" that everything I believe in in terms of software freedom is squarely against.

I mean, I don't really think I have the chops to make it far with the open source and free software communities either, but if I had to pick a dream or a goal to move towards, that would be it. I don't want money or reputation. I just want to be free to tinker with the world as I please.

maybe I'll have the courage next hacktober... but until then, I'm just gonna focus on learning and self-improvement. no one can ridicule me for being a dumbass if I'm actually putting in the effort to learn and improve, right?

would welcome any advice for aspiring open source contributors, as I'm not really sure where to begin that wouldn't make me look like a total hack (pun not intended)

It sometimes really sucks to see how many developers, mostly even much better than me, are too lazy to implement a function to its full UX finish.

Like how can you not implement pagination if you know there's going to be fuck ton of content, how can you not allow deleting entries, how can there be no proper search of content, but instead some google custom search, how can you not implement infinite loading everywhere, but only in parts of your application, how can you not caching a rendered version or improve the page, that loads EVERY SINGLE ENTRY in your database with 11k entries, by just adding a filter and loading only chunks of it.

I know sometimes you need to cut corners, but there's rarely any excuse with modern toolsets to just write 3 lines more and have it ready for such basic things.

I sometimes just wake up during the night or before falling asleep and think "oh, what if in the future he might want to manage that, it's just another view and another function handling a resource, laravel makes that very easy anyway", write in on my list and do it in a blink the next day, if there's nothing else like a major bug.

I have such high standard of delivery for myself, that it feels so weird, how somebody can just deliver such a shitty codebase (e.g. filled with "quick/temporary implementations"), not think of the future of the application or the complete user and or admin experience.

Especially it almost hurts seeing somebody so much more versatile in so many areas than me do it, like you perfectly fine know how to cache it in redis, you probably know a fuck ton of other ways I don't even know of yet to do it, yet you decide to make it such a fucking piece of shit and call it finished.

Hey. Can I borrow your ears for 5 minutes?

Since I've been out of school, I've often felt that even though I've learned how to code, the education went into a totally direction than the one I want to go. Of course a school can't teach you everything perfectly, but having almost no experience in frontend (mind you we learned the BAREST basics) just makes me feel entirely empty in that regard stepping up to a company. I've been pretty loaded during school, since I was struggling with a lot of things so I couldn't really find myself pursueing the direction of coding frontend apps being fun. I needed the little time I had to blow off steam playing games etc.

So the few things I know are all self taught, but I was never given a hand been shown best practices or solid advice where to look. Sitting down now at my pc trying to learn ReactJS for example feels incredibly draining and difficult, since we've never done JS in school ONCE. All the C# experience barely helps, since with ES6 being rolled out parallel to "normal" JS it's even harder to me to connect the lego blocks that is frontend development. Since many best practices are applied to ES6, I can barely even tell what previous practice they are replacing, making the entire picture even more spongy. In one sentence it's very overwhelming.

I've thought I'd apply maybe as a UX/UI Designer since I've got a great visual sense (confirmed countlessly by many, friends and strangers alike) maybe contributing to the frontend part that way. But as I was applying I've noticed that chances are seemingly pretty low to get accepted since it seems you've got zero reputition if you don't have a degree in Design.

It breaks me apart. I could probably apply as a frontend developer, but I am not sure if I would be happy doing that on the long run. Since just fucking around in Photoshop creating things seems like no effort and brings me joy, as compared to coding out lines for example.

I wanted to make money after school, improve on myself and my quality of life since I've drained that entirely for the sake of my education. Not spiral into another couple years just to eventually maybe get in the direction I want to.

On the flipside going into frontend dev with 0 skills, 0 experience, but being expected to have 2 years of hands on experience with the newest frameworks makes me feel empty and worthless.

I often hand out advice to other people on devRant, but this is the one time where I need some. Desperately. I feel shattered inside, getting out of bed in the morning has no incentive to me since I'll just feel like shit all day, watching YouTube to cheer me up temporarily, only to feel immense remorse not spending the day learning or improving on myself. Barely anything brings me joy. I don't wanna call myself depressive, but maybe I am just dodging the term and I am exactly that.

Thanks If you've read through this monstrosity of a rant/story. I'd be glad if you'd be so kind to give me a different take on my situation or a new perspective.

I am stepping on the spot and I am slowly dying inside because of it.

It dreads me to say it, but I need help.

!Rant

I fucking hate my laziness, I really want to make something but I can't have a proper idea, I want to build a portfolio but I'm just stuck with basic knowledge of java that every keeps praising me because of it since their level is shit, like so fucking shit, I hate my classmates this uni the spirit they have, its just depressing on so many levels ! Fucking shit! Why can't I find any motivated people that want to improve generally and just get a good mark to pass the freaking tests!

Last week my PM scheduled a meeting for the whole team of 14 devs to talk about our tasks, how we can improve our workflow, so he's up to date on daily stuff nad sprint progress. After an hour and a half of lots of brainstorming i just asked
- what exactly do you want to achieve with all these changes?
- basically i would like on overview of current progress on each task

And he proposed couple of different meetings during the sprint, which would waste dev time. He proposed to apoint one person reaponsible to keeping him informed during each sprint. He proposed we change our meetings, our process, all of it.
So I just sat with my laptop during the same meeting and I prepared a jira board with swimlanes, filters, etc. Where you can sort by priority, size, what is blocked, what is, waiting in queue, what is being currently developed, what is being tested, what's ready for deployment, etc. Easy. 5-10mins of work.

- does this solve your problem?
-....
- you have everything here
-... What if someone doesn't update the ticket status?
- we check everything during our dailies, so, worst case scenario is the status is not update for 24h
-... Umm.. Yeah.. I think thats it. Thank you.

So, we basically wasted 20+ man-hours on another bullshit meeting because the guy thats supposed to be using these tools doesn't know them at all. After working here for 6 months.

Best: gaining experience and learning new ways to write programs in the best way possible, even beyond working hours

Worst: the amount of ABAP code I saw these past two years gives me nightmares, and older programmers don't seem to want to improve and advance from the old ways of the language 😥

If you want to improve your life, but your mental health and energy levels are too low to exercise, start with hygiene.

Take showers every day, continuously lowering the water temperature. Use dental floss and tongue scraper. Brush your teeth twice a day. Wash your face every morning and every evening. Use evidence-based skincare products: adapalene, panthenol, SPF 50+ sunscreen. Keep your toes and nails tidy. Shave routinely.

According to Nadya Tolokonnikova, a prominent Russian dissident who was imprisoned, denying basic hygiene is a _very_ efficient way of breaking someone into submission that is often applied to dissidents in Russian prisons. So, doing a reverse of that should improve mental health.

part of my workflow i want to improve?

in general, take more time to get to know better the technologies and tools i'm working with.
e.g. learn all the fancy hacks and features of my IDE or of a certain language or framework.

i tend to be in the mode "i don't have time for that, it already works the way i use it". if i spend "too much" time on learning stuff, i feel bad, since i could also spend that time working on my ever growing list of tasks. but i think, that's not a good habit...

True story: My old boss once got told by his boss and our 'General Manager' (we think he self titled himself haha) that he shouldn't read technical books as "you don't want people thinking you're smarter than them".

Couldn't believe it. Imagine trying to improve your knowledge, seemed revolutionary in that place

anyone want to review my app? preferably ones with android experience, I want to learn how to improve it and make it as good as possible. message @calmyourtities if you'd like to help a newbie with android :)

Can We Mark Up This?

I've see this interface and i though this can be seen better with a Mark Up language, like HTML.

So i will send a message about this to improve this app. If You want, do It too.

Sorry, my english isn't very good. Ir You understand my work is made.

And yes, i am a web designer :)

Not imposter syndrome but definitely a moment of self doubt.

Am I good enough?

Been applying for jobs and couldn't get through.

Most of my applications are in neighbouring continent and visa is the primary filter to get rejected. Thanks to COVID-19, it is even more difficult than ever.

And for those applications where I land interviews, I am being ghosted in final rounds.

Quite strange that teams don't even care to reject anymore. Just leave me hanging to assume the worst, the truth, the reality which I don't want to face.

And self doubt creeps in where I see people with average/below average capabilities and skillset are able to find better jobs.

I am not comparing myself, undermining their struggles, or playing the blame game.

All I am saying that luck plays a huge role in how things work out.

You can still fail even after doing everything right. Or am I just dumb enough to not know where I am going wrong to improve?

At this point, if I reflect on past, seems like all the offers I have got in past were purely based on luck.

I am aware that this is temporary and things shall change for good but boy, this feeling sucks.

I'm a self taught android/Java developer, I have never been to any boot camps. But I have worked with someone who been to one.

It is good for developers who already know the concept of programming and want to improve their skills.

I really don’t get it, how can most people just so easily accept shortcomings and not even try for a second to improve the situation?

It drives me crazy ...

story:
I’m debugging an issue with a colleague over screen sharing, both of us have huge 4k screens. Colleague sets a breakpoint, popup opens „do you want to switch to debug perspective“, clicks on yes for the umpteenth time. Breakpoint halts, IDE is full of open and unrelated panels, he doesn’t even see the whole line if code but still grabs the scrollbar every friggin time and scrolls left, right, left, right, ...
changes some code, popup that hot code reload didn’t work, clicks ok for the umpth time here as well, although it has a don’t show again checkbox, like every frigging dialog in eclipse.

how can people work like this, it’s driving me nuts. Am I the only sane dev here??
Other colleague has weird message in the browser console (angular). I ask whats the problem and if he can’t just set a breakpoint to analyze the situation. No thats not possible, he says, instead he’s going to add a return statement to check how far the code execution goes ...

I wonder sometimes if I‘m already dead and have to suffer in dev hell for an unknown reason ... 🤔

For the new/aspiring developers:
1. If you are still looking to learn more, but you don't know where to go, start brainstorming. Make a list of projects you could make and sort them by difficulty. Put the ones you could do now at the top of the list, and the ones you aren't sure how to do yet, at the bottom of the list. As you go through them, if you want to do something but aren't sure how, just hop onto an irc chat and everyone will be glad to help. As you go through the projects, your logic and program design skills should improve, as well as your knowledge of programming.
2. Put comments in your code. Seriously. If you are working on a project and suddenly stop working on it for a week or more, you will go back to look at that code and be extremely confused. If you are making something open source, its even more important. If people can understand the code, they are more likely to contribute to it.
3. Try not to focus on code for too long. The longer you work, the more tired your brain gets. Eventually you get tired and make really stupid decisions in your code.
4. Don't code while tired (look at #3)
5. If you are writing code as an assignment, make sure to rename all variables to proper names before submitting it. The instructor will likely not be pleased to see variable names with the f-bomb in them.

!rant
TL;DR: New(-ish) dev looking for advice to improve workflow and new languages. Hopefully worth a read though :)

Newbie developer here, I took a web applications development class this year since I could take that at another campus rather than do general education courses at my home school, and I have learned and earned a CIW Certification for HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, though I know the certificates do squat if I can't apply myself to them, and I have learned PHP and MySQL.

I want to learn more, technically-applicable languages.

My setup is barebones (to a Linux diehard's eyes), with a gaming laptop that I do a lot of workstation stuff on, an RPi 3 B that I do some Linux-y stuff on, and a less-powerful Development Laptop (that I call a devtop) that I occasionally do work away from home on.

I'm sure most will cringe and weep at my workflow, as I use Windows 10 on both systems and the standard NOOBS software on the pi, and I use Brackets as my text editor, as well as the XAMPP AMP stack for testing.

My biggest questions are what could I do to improve my workflow, and what languages should I learn/apply myself to for real-world application (such as Node.js for live-updating server-side applications or C# for Windows applications)?

Thank you for taking the time to read this, any feedback is helpful! I'm just a high school student with a lot of enthusiasm for development!

for the life of me I cannot figure out in my mind how to structure this project I want to start, and jumping right into coding does not improve this mental block.

At work this Golang code base has a clean architecture, so easy to maintain and extend, and I'm unable to replicate it on my own project(s). It sucks to be an ignorant.

My ideal dev job, would be a job I can show compassion towards. A team I can be proud of and learn from. And a vibrant workspace with likeminded individuals who just want to improve themselves even if they feel their at their pinnacle.

My current office tries to make use of new technologies, we've embedded docker, vagrant, a few ci systems on an in need basis per team, and a lot of other tools.

My only real qualms are they feel indifferent towards new languages and eco systems ( Node.js, GoLang, etc ). Our web team is still using angular.js 1.x, bower, refuses to look into webpack or a new framework for our front end which is currently being bogged down by angulars dirty checking.

Our automated quality assurance team is forced to use Python for end to end testing, I've written an extensive package to make their lives easier including an entire JavaScript interface for dispatching events and properly interacting with custom DOMs outside of the scope of the official selenium bindings.

Our RESTful services are all using flask and Python, which become increasingly slow with our increase in services. I've pushed for the use of Node or GoLang with a GraphQL interface but I'm shot down consistently by our principle engineers who believe everything and anything must be written in Python.

I could go on, but tldr; I'm 21 and I have a ton of aspirations for web development. I'd like to believe I'm well rounded for my age, especially without any formal education. I'd love to be surrounded by individuals who want the same, to learn and architect the greatest platforms and services possible.

I am now going to attempt the problem solving ritual.
Requirements:
-have a problem or piece of unoptimized code and you don't know how tk fix/improve it
-be able to sleep/take a nap

Now before I fall asleep the ritual should provide me with an epiphany to solve my problem

Plan b:
I have a class ninja (model), with an observablecollection<property> properties and an observablecollection<gearslot> gearslots;
,a class gear with an observablecollection<property> properties and an Category category:
And a class gearslot with a Gear gear and a Category category;
Via entity framework this results in several property entries per ninja
And several property entries per gear item

All good so far.

I now actually want the ninja property values, to be the sum of the gear property values

So a ninja has int, agi and str of 0.
Gear has 0 or more stats.
If the ninja has two pieces of gear on with agi +1, then the ninja agi should be 2

If possible i would like the logic in the model.
Else i have to put it in the viewmodel.
That i can figure out, its just so inelegant....

Me vs Myself

I lack of consistency in my life.

Except job, I work on single project for more then four years now.

Besides that I struggle so much to finish things I started or do one thing everyday or even every week for more then one month.

Trying to improve myself but it’s so hard and I don’t know when and how I lost this whole consistency I had that made me good self thought developer. Some people said best they’ve seen but I think I have a lot to learn.

It’s not that I don’t want to continue doing things I started previous day but my narrative self is harassing me so much that I don’t have vital power left.

Whenever I try to fight back it makes me weak and I can’t get up from bed so I lay and wait.

Sometimes I lay whole day and just wait.

When I do nothing my narrative inner voice find me instantly 100 other interesting things to do that make me excited, like:

- let’s check mail - oh new <picks technology> framework let’s try it,
- let’s check news
- let’s see how much <picks something> cost because you want it, buy this thing or you’re gonna die
- go out with this <picks a girl> or you’re gonna die alone
- hey <picks something> is cool let’s see how it works
- hey this <picks some problem> is cooler then the one you’re working on,
- how about to call <picks someone>
- how about go out it’s nice outside
- let’s cook this thing today you need to go to grocery

I don’t know how I figured out I need do nothing and wait to fight myself and do what I started not what my narrative voice want me but I see whole slightly improving now and doing nothing helps a lot.

It makes me focus on things I really want to do not things that are just waste of time.

Anyway thanks if anyone got to the end of this stupid story.

Have a nice day. Keep dreaming.
Peace ✌🏽

Long time reader, first time poster 🙊

2020: I'll complete semesters 2, 3 & 4 out of 6 for my part time MSc computer science while maintaining my current development job.

I want to improve my front end skills and pick up a JavaScript framework as well as getting into Raspberry pi projects to get back in touch with my robotics background prior to development.

Good luck in your own goals everyone!

I been practising lucid dreaming since a few years. It works and is amazing. Now I'm trying to use this moment of subconscious awareness to improve my ideas when sleeping. Yes, I kinda want to work in my dreams, when my brain has other mechanisms active. Can tell you, looks like it is possible!

Your thoughts???

How do i handle code review as a junior developer?
I understand its need and I don't want to skip it.
But I feel under confident after code review when my mistakes are pointed out. They always seem so trivial and wonder how did I even miss them. How should I handle such situations? And how do I improve from here?

I need to improve my C skills to become a kernel developer, so that I can do that full-time at some point. And since it would be 100% remote I could live wherever I want and wouldn't need to PAY STUPID AMOUNTS OF RENT JUST TO LIVE IN A """CITY"""

Oh my freaking gosh! Okay so im "lead tech" on the robotics team. Ive come up with several ways we can improve our system. I had it all planed out and calculated but when i run it by the teacher running the team, EVERY SINGLE FRICKING TIME they shoot it down and they say "that just adds another layer of complexity" and I just want to yell because sure its a bit more complicated but so the fuck what?!?!? It works (theoritically according to math) efficiently and more efficiently than what their doing which is almost unknown to me because why the fuck not?! And omg i sware my entire team has the attentionspan of an ant because any time i need them to explain something, they get dustracted with whatever the hell they get distracted with and they NEVER SHUT THE FUCK UP. Any who other than that being super annoying thats not the point. Point is, the fucking teacher is afraid of making things a bit more complicated for no good reason and ever idea i have they shoot it down so (even as lead tech, and main programmer) i feel extra useless and im not gonna be here next year, so idk what the fuck there gonna do when i leave. (Like seriousally, im not even being conceded, ive been programming for several years. The other programmers have no idea what there doing) but if they dont learn that complexity isnt bad this team will NEVER get higher in the competition.