Sister called me on my way to work (she never calls me, we communicate through a family signal) to ask if I wanted to come over for dinner in the weekend because a new guy she knows will be there and also my parents.

Me: hmm idk I've got a lot to do in the weekend....
Sis: he saw my laptop by the way, he was highly impressed that its dual booted and asked how on earth I know about Linux! Then I told him about you and what you do and now he really wants to meet you!
Me: what time would I have to be there?

I hate how that stuff can make me change my mind just like this 😅

Boss: "I looked at a testing suite. It is $2,500 a license and I'm buying 60 licenses. You should probably get familiar with it."
LeadDev: "Um, we already use NUnit, and it's free."
Boss: "Hmm...I'd better add Pluralsight training in the budget so you can learn about the new program."
LeadDev: "Oh, no...we need new laptops more than we need software."
Boss:"New laptops? Not my budget. When we buy this new software, everyone is going to use it"
LeadDev: "Everyone? How will you monitor it's usage?"
Boss: "I'll have networking send me captures of all the running tasks on the dev machines. The test suite better be running. Writing good tests will be our #1 priority."
LeadDev: "Um, we already write tests using NUnit."
Boss: "I don't understand what you are saying. I need something I can visualize. This UI testing suite is exactly what I need."
LeadDev: "Maybe the testing suite would be better suited for you and QA?"
<click..click>
Boss: "Submitted the budget. There will be a test server available for you to configure. This whole project costs over $100,000, so don't screw it up. Any questions?"
LeadDev: "Oh...well...what server ..."
Boss: "Dang...sorry, I'm taking off the rest of the afternoon. We'll talk about this more on Monday. Get started on those Pluralsight videos. I'll expect a full training and deployments by next week. Have a great weekend!"

The Perfect Storm:

My worst coding mistake? Yeah, let me tell you about that. I pushed a simple JavaScript/HTML change without knowing that the stupid header was shared with another "not so important" section of the site called "My Account" where people go to pay for their services. I call it the perfect storm because I left early that Friday for a weekend cruise and right before leaving I pushed the change, sent the request to push for production and left. When they noticed that clients were complaining about not being able to pay they started reversing most changes of all teams trying to fix it but they never touched mine because they knew I wasn't working on the backend. My whole team worked over the weekend trying to find the issue while I was having fun in the cruise. They ended up reversing all changes by Sunday night and it took us about 4 more days to figure out that my simple JavaScript/HTML change broke the site and prevented 30 million customers from making payments that weekend plus it broke the whole 2nd release of the month.... yeah, nothing major.

And here comes the last part of my story so far.
After deploying the domain, configuring PCs, configuring the server, configuring the switch, installing software, checking that the correct settings have been applied, configuring MS Outlook (don't ask) and giving each and every user a d e t a i l e d tutorial on using the PC like a modern human and not as a Homo Erectus, I had to lock my door, put down my phone and disconnect the ship's announcement system's speaker in my room. The reasons?
- No one could use USB storage media, or any storage media. As per security policy I emailed and told them about.
- No one could use the ship's computers to connect to the internet. Again, as per policy.
- No one had any games on their Windows 10 Pro machines. As per policy.
- Everyone had to use a 10-character password, valid for 3 months, with certain restrictions. As per policy.
For reasons mentioned above, I had to (almost) blackmail the CO to draft an order enforcing those policies in writing (I know it's standard procedure for you, but for the military where I am it was a truly alien experience). Also, because I never trusted the users to actually backup their data locally, I had UrBackup clone their entire home folder, and a scheduled task execute a script storing them to the old online drive. Soon it became apparent why: (for every sysadmin this is routine, but this was my first experience)
- People kept deleting their files, whining to me to restore them
- People kept getting locked out because they kept entering their password WRONG for FIVE times IN a ROW because THEY had FORGOTTEN the CAPS lock KEY on. Had to enter three or four times during weekend for that.
- People kept whining about the no-USB policy, despite offering e-mail and shared folders.
The final straw was the updates. The CO insisted that I set the updates to manual because some PCs must not restart on their own. The problem is, some users barely ever checked. One particular user, when I asked him to check and do the updates, claimed he did that yesterday. Meanwhile, on the WSUS console: PC inactive for over 90 days.
I blocked the ship's phone when I got reassigned.
Phiew, finally I got all those off my chest! Thanks, guys. All of the rants so far remind me of one quote from Dave Barry:

OH MY FUCKING GOD!

My startup actually made the first place in an accelerator program! We'll start negotiations on Monday!! I'm so fucking excited!

Plus I met a really nice person on the train on my way back home! What the actual fuck is that a nice day!

So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.

I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.

I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.

Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.

Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.

Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.

At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.

Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

So, our clients missed their internal deadline this weekend so we as vendor were also forced to work for the weekend and implement new features in a very short period. I implemented new features and my project manager stayed to support the testing and sent me home as I already had tickets bought for the movie.

As someone who hasn't done any developing in a long long time he even tried to implement some changes and complex JavaScript dom manipulation that they asked during testing so that I could be with my gf.

Few hours later he called me and with a sad voice said he is simply too slow and needs my help after all . I came and we stayed until 00h and solved everything. He paid for the movie and taxi.
The thing that impressed me was that he was willing to took over my job so that I wouldn't break my deal.

Best project manager ever!

P.S. Yes my gf went alone at the movie and yes we are still together xD

Overheard a conversation in class today: This dude was talking about how "Linux was terrible and worthless" because he'd spent a few hours trying to install Ubuntu on his laptop over the weekend and couldn't get it to work. I don't know how to tell him Linux isn't the problem here.

We're having an ongoing credential stuffing attack right now. Hackers hit us hard over the weekend and the web team sent out an email congratulating themselves that they stopped the threat.

I decided to look to see how they "fixed" the issue.

They modified their code to stop logging the errors to prevent Splunk from sending the automated emails to management (how we have been able to spot/monitor the attack).

They literally just put their heads in the sand, stapled a sign to their ass that reads "Meteor? We see no meteor approaching. Everything is fine."

Today I felt sorry for my boss.

Story behind it:
My boss always encourages me to do the right thing. One of those right things is to enforce quality gates in our build pipelines which, as many of you know, means that the build fails if certain quality parameters are not met. Now an external vendor team merged the code this past thursday for a large feature that they had been working on and our build failed majestically throwing out the statistics and the offending files and lines of code.

All hell broke loose and there were escalations and what not and people working extra hours and over the weekend to try and get it right. So, I get a call from my boss earlier today to explain to me how important it is to release the feature and how it's going to be very bad if we don't. He was trying to justify his ask which was to lower the quality criteria and let the build pass for this week. Of course the dev in me was furious but then I realized it's not him but the corporate culture. Why would he or anyone would risk losing their jobs over the quality of code?

If you work at a place where IT is a support function of the company's primary business, I understand the moral compromises you guys have to make sometimes to keep the ball rolling. Thank you for your effort to make the world a better place.
So, thank you boss for all your support. I know it's not always up to you to decide on things but keep up the good work.

Worst disturbance while working?

Some of my faves:
- Mgr flying his new $400 drone around the office (hitting walls, ceiling, etc). I mentioned the price because he crashed it a week later (un-repairable kind of crash), so I didn't feel too sorry for his loss.
- Mgr trying out his new blowgun and blowing darts at a cardboard box down/bewtween the cube hallway (where anyone could walk out of at any time). We would hear the "pfffft" and a loud 'Yea!'.
- Mgr would walk by a cube entry-way, fart, and walk away laughing.
- Mgr called me into area and his desk+the floor area around his desk was covered in peanut shells.
Me: "Wow, you got a mess here."
Mgr: "Yea, got tired of trying to hit the trash can. Maintenance will vacuum the office this weekend."
The mess was one thing, but what disturbed me the most was this asshole thinks Maintenance-Jim has nothing better to do than clean up after this so-called adult.

Karma kicked in and an hour later the owner's wife (we're still a family owned company, so he+his wife are on friendly basis with everyone) stopped by to say hi and walked in on the mess.
June: "What do we have here!?"
Mgr: "Oh...um...uh..I was eating a few peanuts and putting the shells in the trash can and accidentally knocked it over. I was on my way to get the vacuum cleaner."
June: "Hmmm...this looks like more than a few. *You* clean it up right now and *never* let me see this again!"
Mgr: "Yes..yes ma'am...right now.."

Whole office heard the exchange and it was frickin' awesome.

My team handles infrastructure deployment and automation in the cloud for our company, so we don't exactly develop applications ourselves, but we're responsible for building deployment pipelines, provisioning cloud resources, automating their deployments, etc.

I've ranted about this before, but it fits the weekly rant so I'll do it again.

Someone deployed an autoscaling application into our production AWS account, but they set the maximum instance count to 300. The account limit was less than that. So, of course, their application gets stuck and starts scaling out infinitely. Two hundred new servers spun up in an hour before hitting the limit and then throwing errors all over the place. They send me a ticket and I login to AWS to investigate. Not only have they broken their own application, but they've also made it impossible to deploy anything else into prod. Every other autoscaling group is now unable to scale out at all. We had to submit an emergency limit increase request to AWS, spent thousands of dollars on those stupidly-large instances, and yelled at the dev team responsible. Two weeks later, THEY INCREASED THE MAX COUNT TO 500 AND IT HAPPENED AGAIN!

And the whole thing happened because a database filled up the hard drive, so it would spin up a new server, whose hard drive would be full already and thus spin up a new server, and so on into infinity.

Thats probably the only WTF moment that resulted in me actually saying "WTF?!" out loud to the person responsible, but I've had others. One dev team had their code logging to a location they couldn't access, so we got daily requests for two weeks to download and email log files to them. Another dev team refused to believe their server was crashing due to their bad code even after we showed them the logs that demonstrated their application had a massive memory leak. Another team arbitrarily decided that they were going to deploy their code at 4 AM on a Saturday and they wanted a member of my team to be available in case something went wrong. We aren't 24/7 support. We aren't even weekend support. Or any support, technically. Another team told us we had one day to do three weeks' worth of work to deploy their application because they had set a hard deadline and then didn't tell us about it until the day before. We gave them a flat "No" for that request.

I could probably keep going, but you get the gist of it.

Jusssttt in case anything goes wrong over the weekend I got a team of developers on standby...

On being a woman in tech...

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

Here's an example from this weekend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Experiencing it right now.

As I type this I am sat in hospital having lost power to my hands over the weekend.

I work a day job, I have my own startup that I’m working on and I’m also freelancing on another startup.

Just been diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome. It sucks. My hands feel about as a strong as a particularly weak 4 year old girl.

My great uncle came over this weekend, and he is a big Apple fan though he owns a little hp. He asked me if I knew windows ten, to which I said yes, and then said he had a problem. His internet wouldn't connect. I came to his laptop, and he already had the wifi menu up, which said in big letters "Your WiFi is turned off." So I said to him "Your WiFi is turned off." He proclaimed his disdain for "the software" and asked if I could fix it. Instead of clicking the very obvious button that took maybe 10% of his screen, I opened command prompt as admin and entered "netsh interface show interface" followed by "netsh interface set interface Wi-Fi enabled"

I followed it up by saying I fixed a problem with his wireless card and that he should be able to use the large wifi button that appears when he opens the menu to turn it off and on again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This little guy arrived in the mail over the weekend. Now he'll be sitting at my desk at work.

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.

"Everyone must attend this meeting. It's really important that you all attend".

Me: *walks into meeting with other co-workers

Host: So what should we discuss today?

Co-worker 1: We can discuss how we did on the recently completed project.

Host: We'll save that for next meeting.

Co-worker 2: Any strategic plans for upcoming project?

Host: That too, for next meeting.

Me: Black Panther.

Host: That was actually a great movie. I saw it over the weekend. Who else saw it? ....

Me (in my thoughts): Just wow! 😂

PS: I still haven't seen that movie.

Senior manager calls me at 3pm today. I’ve known about this issue since last Friday, one of her pions told me to hold off until Thursday when he’s back in the office and that I could prioritise other tasks.

I have another task with a deadline of the 21st with the potential for fines if it’s not done.

Snr manager: “I’m calling to see how this is going”
Me: “cool, it’s not, bigger problems in the world”
Snr manager: “waah, this has to be done Monday or we face the potential of a court case, fines, this is the biggest problem in the world”
Me: “I’ve known about this issue for a week, have been told not to worry too much and nobody has mentioned the impact or timeline you’ve just given me.”
Snr manager: “so can it be done for monday”
Me: “no chance”
Snr manager: “why not?”
Me: “because it’s 3pm Friday and I have 1 hour of Work left, good luck”

My manager was in the room, he got an arsey call soon after. I don’t really care how that one went but he’s a good guy so I’m sure it was fine.

I also had the joy of asking: so give me an idea of the potential fine... to which they wouldn’t give me an answer.

I need this to weigh up which of the potentially finable tasks takes priority.

The other team that had trouble told me all the dates, gave me over a months notice and the scale of the problem.

If you want someone to help: be polite, give them as much warning as you have and be absolutely honest.

The job’s done cause I’m a fucking legend. But they’re not gonna find out until 5pm Monday. That’s the dickhead tax, they get the dickhead tax for being dickheads.

I’m gonna spend Monday working from home, incommunicado. Fuck incompetent arseholes.

Enjoy your weekend everyone, I know I will mine.

Front end + back end = Project finished.

This is my first full stack application that I spent a month working on. It's a basic database that holds car information and saves it to a SQL db. I built this using Java Spring/Hibernate for my backend and Node.JS/REACT for my front end. Mariadb handles SQL requests. REACT handles token requests for secure login, that was the hardest part of this whole thing.

I was going to comment on how frequently I feel like garbage and an inadequate excuse of a human being, but today is my birthday and this is the best gift I could get, a finished project from scratch.

I'm 29 today devRant. And I work over the weekend before going back to school, but at least I fucking finished something that I started.

...thanks, for everything. 😄

To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.

Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming

I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)

When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.

From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.

But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.

And then..

Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.

So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.

I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.

Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.

At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.

Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.

By God, I would prove them wrong.

And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.

1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.

I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.

Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.

Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)

TLDR;
Wrote a slick scheduling and communication system allowing me to assign photography resources based on time and location.

I'll tell you a little secret ... I'm not actually a dev. I'm a photographer, pretending to be a dev.

Or ... perhaps it's the other way around? (I spend most of my time writing code these days, but only for me - I write the software I use to run my business).

I own a photography studio - we specialize in youth volleyball photography (mostly 12-18 year old girls with a bit of high school, college and semi-pro thrown in for good measure - it's a hugely popular sport) and travel all over the US (and sometimes Europe) photographing.

As a point of scale, this year we photographed a tournament in Denver that featured 100 volleyball courts (in one room!), playing at the same time.

I'm based in California and fly a crew of part-time staff around to these events, but my father and I drive our booth equipment wherever it needs to go. We usually setup a 30'x90' booth with local servers, download/processing/cashier computers and 45 laptops for viewing/ordering photographs. Not to mention 16' drape and banners, tons of samples, 55' TVs, etc. It's quite the production.

We photograph by paid signup only - when there are upwards of 800 teams/9,600 athletes per weekend playing, and you only have four trained photographers, you've got to manage your resources!

This of course means you have to have a system for taking sign those sign ups, assigning teams to photographers and doing so in the most efficient manner possible based on who is available when the team is playing. (You can waste an awful lot of time walking from one court to another in a large convention center - especially if you have to navigate through large crowds - not to mention exhausting yourself).

So this year I finally added a feature I've wanted for quite some time - an interactive court map. I can take an image of the court layout from the tournament and create an HTML version in our software. As I mouse over requests in one window, the corresponding court is highlighted on the map in another browser window. Each photographer has a color associated with them. When I assign requests to a photographer, the court is color coded with the color of the photographer. This allows me to group assignments to minimize photographer walk time and keep them in a specific area. It's also very easy to look at the map and see unassigned requests and look to see what photographer is nearby.

This year I also integrated with Twilio and setup a simple set of text shortcuts that photographers can use to let our booth staff know where they are, if they have memory cards that need picking up, if they need water/coffee/snack, etc. They can also move assignments on their schedule or send and SOS for help if it looks like they aren't going to be able to photograph a team.

Kind of a CLI via the phone. :)

The additions have turned out to be really useful and has made scheduling and managing the photographers much easier that it was in the past.

When you spend a weekend building your custom rig, but the inner fanboy conscience takes over 😜

I've been wondering for a while, how the backend my team has to use could have so many issues. I was convinced they had no alerting system in place and have been commenting on it for a while now, and complaining about it.

Was on a Zoom call with one of the backend devs today, he shared his screen and had his email open. I saw a folder he had setup called alerts, and sub folders under that. One of them was named the name of the service/app we are using ... it had over 360,000 un-reads ... and emails are automatically deleted after 4 months in my company.

So they have alerts setup, they just don't care ... problem solved. Enjoy your weekend folks!

I'm unbelievably angry. So please bear with my venting.

QA guy and I are stuck working the entire weekend. A few months ago our company decided to promote an account manager to a Product/Project management role with 0 experience and offering them 0 training. They have no experience working with devs and have been making our lives hell. I work easily 50-60hrs per week and they still budget projects according to 40hrs/week meaning they're stealing my time not to mention they're incorrectly setting the client's and company's expectations.

They now have complete control over roadmaps, client communications (this wouldn't normally be bad except that they're having technical discussions with the client with 0 tech experience), timelines, etc. and since their experience was in account management they are now working with devs but making decisions that exclusively put the client first at all costs, even if it means everyone else has to work weekends while they go on vacation!!!!

I've approached them several times to offer help on budgeting time or to propose that we do a Q4 planning so that we can improve the product instead of stay in a shitty position as we are. I'm responded with "You deal with what's in front of you. It's my job to look at the bigger picture."

They mismanaged a $500,000 project and our CEO got wind of it because the client called him while he was travelling. He in turn gave shit to our Directors who in turn chewed the QA guy and I out. "You need to be more meticulous when deploying. How could you let this happen? We're eating shit because of this. You need to work over the weekend to make up for this", etc.
I'm now directly responsible for having delivered something that wasn't up to standards even though I was already putting in the overtime.

This is honestly fucking ridiculous. How can I be blamed when I'm truly doing the best I can and putting as many hours as I can while edging toward burnout.

I love what I do but I hate feeling extremely pressured to turn down friends and family like this. Maybe I'm just too easy going and need to say no more. Who fucking knows. I know that I'm angry with the company right now.

What do you all think? If you read this rant, thank you. Feels better to write it out.

DAMN IT JUST SEND ME SOME FLOWERS

Started a new job yesterday, and rather than making my partner work to pick up hints I have said explicitly a few times that I want him to send me flowers at work, because

1) Yay flowers!
2) Displays dominance over other women at work because it demonstrates I have a caring partner
3) Did I mention pretty flowers?
4) Let's the dudes at work know I'm in a relationship so that means we can all just focus on being colleagues

FFS I even sent a link to a site that does local same day delivery for no extra charge, and pointed out the three bouquet styles I like best. So easy.

But he has yet to send me any.

And as I'm filling out the W-4, learning that I have to pay an extra $10k in taxes, because we eloped a week ago and apparently that's what happens when two high earners file jointly and it's making me want to rant because THE COST OF FLOWERS IS INSIGNIFICANT TO MY TAX BURDEN SO SEND ME THE DAMN FLOWERS.

(and yes technically it's "our" tax burden and yes the money spent on a bouquet would only add to our shared house expenses but I don't care; I'm generally anti flower but there's a time and a place and this is the time and the place)

And if he sends them late in the week, a significant portion of their prime blooming time will be during the weekend which is just wasteful so ugh.

</rant>

i was asked to start a new project, and another dev was brought onto the team shortly after. as soon as he joined, straight away he started an entirely new project and worked on it through the whole weekend, then came back on monday and just sort of pasted his files into/over the code i had already started and was working on, with no regard for folder structure or naming conventions or anything. his work was even split between 2 almost identically named namespaces (both of which were completely different to the existing project namespace) and his shit broke everything i did in the first place. the cherry on top is that none of his work was even functional, it was purely dummy/mockup web pages that weren't linked to any sort of backend.

when i asked him wtf he thought he was doing, he kept saying "i didnt touch your code" and refused to acknowledge that pasting a project over a different project can break stuff, then said it "wasn't his fault that i'm slow and not keeping up". and just kept saying vague bullshit about how i have to do it his way because he "has more experience"

he had no idea what my previous experience was, he had never asked and i had never told him, he just decided that he had more experience than me.

i dug through the shit and found out that he didn't just break my work, he had actually purposely deleted it when he realised it was getting in the way of his spaghetti. i showed him the commit and confronted him with it and all the cunt said was "well the good news is, you know the fix" and kept trying to dismiss me in the most disrespectful ways he could think of. i eventually snapped at him (long overdue at this point) and told him that any experienced developer would not commit code that didn't even fucking compile, especially when they're the one who broke it, and that he needs to grow up. of course he then complained that i was being unprofessional.

our manager decided we should go with fuckfaces """code""" without even looking at the work either of us had done, purely because fuckface is older than me and that's how the world works.

in the end i just told my manager that i refuse to work with the guy and he could either take him or me off the project (guess who he picked) or i quit.

after a few months of the guy failing to deliver any of even the basic functionality that was asked for, the entire project got scrapped, and the dude just quit once everyone realised he was literally just larping as an experienced dev but couldn't accomplish simple tasks.

i never received an apology from anybody involved.

Team Lead just filed a bug saying there was no errors on the server over the weekend. O.o

Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.

Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.

I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.

I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.

Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.

Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.

The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!

Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.

I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.

I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.

Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.

The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.

I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.

At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.

I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.

Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.

However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.

How it is to be a dev in my country?

At bit of an odd question this week.

For me (in the USA), it's being technical support for *every* website my family uses.

Over the weekend my wife visited her aunt and I get a call.

Wife: "How do I create an ebay account?"
Me: "I don't like where this is going. We already have an account."
Wife: "Not for me, dummy, Aunt T. She found some books she wants to buy on ebay."
Me: "You go thru the process to create an account? Email, name, password, etc."
Wife: "We tried that, but it's not working."
<few seconds of silence>
Me: "Oookaaay...why isn't it working? Is there an error?"
Wife: "I don't know, we already clicked off of it. Something about the email."
<few more seconds of silence>
Me: "Can you reproduce the error and tell me?"
Wife: "Uggh..are you serious? We've done it like 10 times, its not working. Just tell me what I need to do."
Me: "If you can't tell me the error, I can't help you. I'm not there and can't see what you see."
Wife: "Stop being an asshole."
<Aunt T takes the phone>
T: "Said something about using another email address. Does that help you?"
Me: "Are you sure you don't already have a ebay account?"
T: "No, I don't think so. I hate ebay. but I really want these books. I don't want the same problems as last time."
Me: "Last time?"
T: "Yes, I bought a coffee cup on ebay from China and it never arrived."
Me: "OK, so you do have an account?"
T: "I don't know, I mean, I never got the cup."
Me: "What email address did you use? I'll send a 'remind me' email so you can reset the password and login"
<go thru the motions, she is able to login>
T: "Ahhh...I do have an account! There are the golf balls I bought for <husband> for Christmas."
<face smack>
Wife: "Why didn't you do this from the start? I thought you knew a lot about computers. We basically figured this out ourselves. Goodbye!"
<click>

My uncle was a programmer. My whole extended family lived very close together, so I saw him almost every weekend. He would tell me tall tales about the war between corporations and open source. I started hating all things Microsoft and advocating for Linux. For my 12th birthday, he gave me a computer he had recently fixed. Of course, it had Ubuntu Linux.

That's when he started teaching me the basics: Bash, Lisp, and C. I know some of you are tired of the cliche "I started coding at 12 and built my first OS at 16," but of course that's not reality. I really just wrote simple math formulas like chicarronera^[1] for my homework, a super simple text-input videogame, and a button-filled GUI. That's nothing compared to what I do now, so I won't dare put that into my resume. But it did give me an advantage over my peers, and by the time I had to self-learn web development for my job, my uncle had already given me all of these tools.

[1] Spanish slang for the quadratic equation. Literally means "street vendor who sells chicharron". The formula is taught so fierce in school that even street vendors must know it.

OK.
1. So i tindered.
2. I got a really nice girl.
3. We chatted really long and good.
4. We tried to meetup it did not work because of our schedule. New
job on my end, she is a student.
5. I thought its over. Fine whatever.
6. She gives me her number.
7. We continue chat on whatsapp
8. Blablabla 3 days long, she gets bored and tries to friendzone me
9. I revert the shit and state i wanna be serious and there wont be a
friendzone/nice guy comin from me.
10. She happy and continues to chat.
11. I get emtionally invested in her.
12. We exchange thoughts dreams and music.
13 We want to meetup at weekend. I cant. Got a family wedding all
weekend.
14. We want to meetup the second week.
I cant. Im off on a company trip. Again new job here.
15. So we say in the week after I get back.
15a. Before the weekend we need to deliver an rc and go all out to hold
the deadline.
15b. We deliver, but shit happens on the customer side. His fault but we
get the blame.
15c I go onto the company trip.
16. We chat and i send her pictures of the trip over the weekend so she
sees I care.
17. She seems fine. And happy.
18. I come back from the trip late night and need to work the next day
jetlag style.
19. I work jetlag style. And try to fix the shit from last week.
20. I come home really tired and looking forward to date day tomorrow.
21. I cant do anything. My home looks like shit and the bag still
unpacked. I just eat and fall asleep.
I feel bad bcs my home will turn her down instantly if we make it to my
place.
Need to hope that it does not come to this.
22. Date day comes. Today.
23. I wake up at 6 early to plan ahead to make sure my clothes are fine
and i arrive on time in the office to exit early.
24. I expect to check what goes on today in the city and give her the
location to meet and time.
25. I enter office and immeadetly get caught up in meeting planning, dev
questions and the meeting itself because the project is on edge.
26. We have a 5hours long meeting where people go on and on and on.
27. 3h later in the meeting:
my brain was fried and around 12 i go to lunch with some people.
28. Meanwhile the city is turning into a rainy mess of a shitty day. No
way I can have a nice walk with her like that. Bars and coffeshops are
just to boring.
29. So i eat to regain some sense and we go back to the office.
Meanwhile I am thinking all kinds of locations and stuff in my head.
30. Havent given her any update since a good morning in the morning.
31. We reenter the meeting. Things continue like before. The project is
on impossible demands and impossible timelines. Still we try to do our
best.
32 3h later on 3pm I tell her i am in a long meeting and working on a
meetingspot.
33. shes not happy.
34. I get a call from a relative
35. i need to go out and take the call. not good for the collegues.
again new job here.
36. family trouble,  money trouble, goverment demands. I promise to
handle that tomorrow. Before work.
37. i get back into the meeting.
38. still super slow and no results.
39. need to focus but start to check for locations on my phone.
40. she asks me where i am
41. I send her my location.
42. she thinks i am saying she should pick me up!
43 i joke and say no definitly not.
44. shes pissed.
45.  I decide for a coffeeshop. after work. and send her the location
46. She says to call it off.
47. I go all in and go romance style. I say ill wait there even if she
does not come to show her how much i care.
U know to avoid the lets do it some other time fuckery and then it never
happens.
47. She goes quiet.
48. 2h later we finish the meeting. Meanwhile QA foudn a bug we need to
fix because why not.
49. I got 30 minutes to find the bug and fix it before I need to go to
uphold my word.
50. I find out what to do, but it might break a lot of other things
without careful test and implementation. Collegues says he takes it.
51 I feel bad but I need to go. I even leave earlier because otherwise I
would not be on time.
52. I arrive 15 minutes early. I grab two coffee2go and wait outside,
53. Shitty weather, sometimes rain, sometimes sunny, cant decide what it
wants.
54. The weather is just like how I feel.
55. I wait 1 1/2h
56. I think I should feel stupid, For gods sake its tinder. People dont
give a crap, Enough people around why should I Invest so much into this?
But I dont feel stupid. Because this is how I want it. I dont want
appointments, I dont want safety. I decided for her and I went all in.
57. I send her pics from the sceneray as proof that I waited,
58. I think I blew it. She is still quiet.
59. Friends are asking me for plans for the weekend. I wish I could say
I already have some with her.
60. I feel lost right now. But my head says I put too much stress on
her, And i fucked up with the planning. I should have been more precise.
My head also says that i am putting myself into the victim role, which
is wrong always. Should I continue to reach out to her? Is there
something I could do still?

My dad got a new phone over the weekend and asked me to help him set it up (TL;DR his IPhone broke, he likely cussed out someone on the phone and now he's on android).

Setting up his bank app, I asked for his password (I somehow knew asking a 80+ year old man password questions wouldn't end well)

<pulls a card out of his wallet>
Dad: "Here you go."
Me: "This is your business card?"
Dad: "Yep. Password is at the bottom. That way I never forget it."
Me: "Jeez dad, you shouldn't have your bank's password on a business card. You don't give these out to people, do you?"
Dad: "Sometimes. Hell, they won't know what that is. Its just a bunch of nonsense."

Luckily the password didn't work. He had to reset it when his IPhone messed up and didn't remember what he changed the password to.

Got this from boss (a few colleagues got it as well):
Sites have been down over the weekend and seems the only person cares is PM! There is a condition about working when required (i.e. unpaid OT) on your contract! It is essential that sites are properly managed even at weekends - we run a online business! If anyone has problems we'll discuss next week
*Note: site was partially down and there was no major impact on the business

When I explained why we need to rebuild the sites, you said not now - almost 2 years now, still nothing happens.
When I asked if we can get managed hosting or load balancer, fecking NO again
After asking for my opinion on the sites, you & the puppet think my honesty is me being negative and incorporate, and exclude me from meetings and major part of my work

Go fuck yourself! I've warned you about the status of the sites and you did not want to listen SO DON'T TELL ME I'M NOT DOING MY JOB WHEN YOU'RE THE ONE STOPPING ME FROM DOING IT PROPERLY!
I'm sure we'll have our meeting very soon, cheapskate.

When you learn your project will be launched Monday in an email sent to the whole company, just before the weekend...

I'm not even kidding. No one on our team was consulted if the app was ready or not.

There was no infrastructure in place to even deploy the app. Everything had to be done in a hurry over the weekend to deploy something half baked, thanks to that idiot project manager who told his boss everything was ready.

Two colleagues ended up doing this work over the weekend, but looking back, if I was the one having to get something deployed over the weekend, I would have just refused and come back to work as usual on Monday and watch that idiot explain why it's not live.

Sunday 8pm, when you realise the weekend is over

Years ago, I was part of a project that went completely off the rails. A little context: we were a services company and we had local offices in cities all over the country. My team provided 2nd-level support which means we often had the PMs call us from those via an annoying Nextel radio.

I won’t go through the details but suffice it to say this project envolved one such branch going rogue and committing actual fraud, with criminal proceedings and all. People were on the edge, and the relationship with that branch was increasingly hostile. There was also an internal power struggle in the company between some directors at that point. In other words, a clusterfuck I’ll always cherish, if by cherish you mean hate hate hate. Anywho…

One time, there was a national holiday on a Thursday and we were going to make it a long weekend. As customary, I communicated with all the PMs about contigency plans. This PM then told us that we could not take Friday off because the customer wanted us to fly over there. We were supposed to be at the customer’s site early Friday morning. That meant we would have to fly Thrusday afternoon. I wasn’t happy.

It immediatly felt arbitrary too. As I said, the relationship was not good and we suspected he was just trying to cost us our days off. I knew enough of the customer to be fairly sure they would not have requested us that Friday. Why did the customer want us then? There was nothing yet on production and if it was just to show progress, surely we could move it to Monday. At worst, can’t we make it over the phone? No, no, no, he said. The customer was adamant that we be there on Friday. Sucked to be us.

So we flew over Thursday afternoon and on Friday morning we headed to the customer’s offices only to find it closed. They too had made it a long weekend and wouldn’t be back until Monday.

Normally I would be furious over the waste of time but to be honest, both I and my colleague smiled at that. It confirmed that the PM just tried to screw us and the customer have never asked for us. We headed back to the local office.

Before coming in, we both bought ourselves some icecream. My friend stayed in the little garden in front and I went in. The PM immediatly saw me and demanded to know why I wasn’t at the customer yet. I didn’t answer. Instead I grabbed the Nextel radio and headed back out with the PM following. I then sat down on the grass and called my director. Smiling and staring at the PM, I told him about the office being closed. The PM’s face froze when my director asked to talk to him.

We sat outside under the sun, enjoying our icecreams while the PM got shouted at. It was the best icecream I’ve ever had.

Built my new PC over the weekend.. An absolute beast... A Blood Beast

My Dad: "Hey since you mostly use your desktop, could I borrow your laptop for my trip?"
He just wants to play World of Warcraft but there is no way I'm going to let him have access to my PC after years of fixing his computer. Because he's my dad and helped pay for the laptopn, I can't just say no without him getting flustered so this is what happened.

Me: "Yeah sure, you'll just need to find whether or not WoW, works with a windows emulator and hunt down how to configure that."

D: "Why can't you do it?"

M: "I've never done it. Its like the price to borrow."

D: >:| "I'll ask your brother."

He did end up borrowing my brothers laptop for the trip because he was running windows and didn't have a good excuse. I just helped him uninstall the blizzard client, WoW, avast, and McAfee that was installed over the weekend.

It's Sunday night... Jira is emailing you because your product manager assigned you 12 tasks.

You're about to check what these tasks are, then realize ... my weekend isn't over yet!

Goodnight phone, goodbye g-mail, it's time for some more games and TV

All my friends have girlfriends right now, spending good times and having fun over the weekend.

And here I am trying to figure out how to integrate Jquery UI with React :(

fucking hostgator!

go suck a cock you developers!

everything from their payment system to their support is crap.

a few days ago, i purchased a website from hostgator, with a year of hosting during black friday weekend. i had obtained a black friday coupon code that entitled me to roughly $160 off its usual price. that said, i filled out the registration form and clicked the 'checkout' button.

right after i clicked it, i saw i forgot to put in the coupon code, and pressed the back button on my browser. then i put in the code and proceeded with checkout.

guess what?

those MOTHERFUCKING GREEDY ASS BITCHES charged me TWICE, one with the coupon and one without.

i contacted customer support and told them what happened after waiting about double the time i was supposed to be connected to support.

of course, they asked for my fucking "security" pin over the customer support live chat (totally not ironic).

they sent a confirmation email, and cancelled the payment without the coupon.

then ONE FUCKING DAY LATER, I tried to connect to my website.

MY SITE WAS FUCKING SUSPENDED.

die in a hole.

i contacted customer support once more, and after explaining the story, I had to wait four to eight hours.

i'll see how it turns out tomorrow.

die in a hole hostgator🖕

!rant Went shooting for the first time over the weekend. Was so proud of my grouping that I hung my target on the door to the garage on the side that faces the garage so if anyone breaks into my garage they have to see it before getting into the house. 😂

Really just an average week.
Just feel I need a bit of venting. (:

@meet: (monday)
- mgr: we need video transcoding and VOD ASAP.
- dev: on what server? It's expensive, especially without a GPU.
- mgr: prod is beefy. Put it there.
- dev: everything else is gonna crawl then.
- mgr: you have till the end of this week.

@demo (Friday)
- dev: k, it's ready.
- mgr: Why is everything slow??!
- dev: transcoding. Expensive.
- mgr: Why do we transcode? Never said I wanted transcode!
Can't we upload to YT?
- dev: ...yes. But will then each customer that wants VOD will need to setup YT studio and provide an endpoint and stream key.
- mgr: OK. But we're now behind schedule because of this and the customers will not be pleased.
- dev: oh, didn't know we're into gaming.
- mgr: ???
- dev: nvm, see you Monday.

...
Later Friday evening
...
*ding* mgr has added 5 new tasks to your list.
*ding* mgr subtracted 30 points from you.
reason: deadline over due.

Ya ya, the usual shenanigans.
Time to mute for the weekend.

A long and stressful week is over, and I missed my train back home, so I went to read a microhistory (beer).

Enjoy your weekend devs and ranters!

Post after a long long time...

Wanted to reply to so many comments and mentions, rant about a bunch of topics, do a face reveal after I went for a vacation with family and got some pictures, update y'all on my job hunt, but was busy like hell.

Anyway, time for a story.

After my rejection with Meta and Booking, I started preparing like crazy and my interviews started going well. Refined my LinkedIn further and recruiters started reaching out as well.

Over time, with efforts and feedback, I was able to build a good pipeline.

One of my dream companies reached out to me and I got hired in just 1 round and all others were merely a formality. I was euphoric, but at the same time didn't get over excited as this seemed fishy.

They made a very good monetary offer and I didn't talk to my manager yet regarding resignation. They are pushing me for an early joining.

Read a bunch of Glassdoor reviews and also spoke to a friend who just recently quit that organisation.

He confirmed that the company has 3 months of notice, has sandwich leave policy, and some other XLT political mess.

I decided to decline the offer tomorrow.

Day saved? Not yet.

Because of this I slacked off work a lot. I am super screwed with work items pending because I thought I'd quit.

My boss resinged and new one isn't that supportive yet. He is trying to change everything overnight. Typical.

I ended up performing poorly in other companies because I was confident I'll pick this offer and didn't prepare for upcoming good companies.

Moreover, we have our offices opening up from April and I might be asked to relocate to another city which does not have a team but just because it is on paper, they might force me to be in office 50% of the time.

And what's worse is, my relationship with tech is deteriorating and they are putting the entire product team in bad light.

I have a planned weekend trip coming up, so I won't be able to prepare for interviews or work on case studies so that shit will pile up more.

I am sooooo fucking screwed. Life was stable and then all of a sudden too 180° flip.

I am hysterical right now.

Manager: "We're gonna have to work over the weekend to add this shiny new feature!"
Me: "Peanuts and Incentives included?"
Manager: "No, but you get job satisfaction!"
Me: 😒

Craziest bug, not so much in the sense of what it was (although it was itself wacky too), but in what I went through to fix it.

The year was 1986. I was finishing up coding on a C64 demo that I had promised would be out on a specific weekend. I had invented a new demo effect for it, which was pretty much the thing we all tried to do back then because it would guarantee a modicum of "fame", and we were all hyper-ego driven back then :) So, I knew I wanted to have it perfect when people saw it, to maximize impressiveness!

The problem was that I had this ONE little pixel in the corner of the screen that would cycle through colors as the effect proceeded. A pixel totally apart from the effect itself. A pixel that should have been totally inactive the entire time as part of a black background.

A pixel that REALLY pissed me off because it ruined the utter perfection otherwise on display, and I just couldn't have that!

Now, back then, all demos were coded in straight Assembly. If you've ever done anything of even mild complexity in Assembly, then you know how much of a PITA it can be to find bugs sometimes.

This one was no exception.

This happened on a Friday, and like I said, I promised it for the weekend. Thus began my 53 hours of hell, which to this day is still the single longest stretch of time straight that I've stayed awake.

Yes, I spent literally over 2+ days, sitting in front of my computer, really only ever taking bio breaks and getting snacks (pretty sure I didn't even shower)... all to get one damn pixel to obey me. I would conquer that f'ing pixel even if it killed me in the process!

And, eventually, I did fix it. The problem?

An 'i' instead of an 'l'. I shit you not!

After all these years I really don't remember the details, except for the big one that sticks in my mind, that I had an 'i' character in some line of code where an 'l' should have been. I just kept missing it, over and over and over again. I mean, I kinda understand after many hours, your brain turns to mush. and you make more mistakes, so I get missing it after a while... but missing it early on when I was still fresh just blows my mind.

As I recall, I finally uploaded the demo to the distro sight at around 11:30pm, so at least I made my deadline before practically dropping dead in bed (and then having to get up for school the next morning- D'oh!). And it WAS a pretty impressive demo... though I never did get the fame I expected from it (most likely because it didn't get distributed far and wide enough).

And that's the story of what I'd say was my craziest bug ever, the one that probably came closest to killing me :)

Ok, I’m over windows. Done with it.

I have been a long time windows, I’ve used most versions since 3.11, and have used Linux for a few years on the side (not as a daily but have needed it for work and servers) but with yesterday’s update, not only have I lost audio for the countless time again, as far as Windows is concerned there’s nothing fucking wrong with it, besides the lack of sound and all.

Drivers are reinstalled, deleted and reinstalled, redownloaded from manufacturer, different drivers installed.
Ran a system restore back to before the update and just dropped the hdd into another laptop (it’s identical model) and still no fucking audio (to exclude the audio chip as failing)

So fuck it, I’m spending my weekend finding a distro that will work, I’m fucking done!

Went back to KDE over the weekend from i3wm. I was getting tired of having to configure my setup manually everytime I wanted to change a setting, and having things break, and having to bug fix said breaks, while also trying to handle Java MVC and node.js dev work.

Nope. Too much. I want the macOS experience but with the control of Linux. Much happier with KDE. It does use about 720MB more RAM on an average session but when you have 8GB does it really matter?

Now to figure out how to get Firefox to play nice with Plasma, or give Konqueror a spin.

TLDR someone in my team took credit for work he didnt do;

I know teamwork is a good thing and when everyone does their share of the work, it is.

I submitted a computer science project to an event in the UK called the Big Bang fair, I was in a group of 3. We had been meeting every week after for the past 10 months. During these sessions me and uke have been meeting for 1h 30m where as oon could only meet for 1h because "he had stuff to do" and he never saw the point in staying longer. Oon had also been a massive distraction whilst the time he was there as he did no work and messed around on cookie clicker.

Anyway we found out last week that the Big Bang fair was coming very soon and we had not written a write up or done any preparation for the presentation we had to do. Me and uke set up a google doc and started adding stuff to it (as we only had a few days left at this point). Whereas oon did nothing.

I ended up staying up till 3am in the morning finalising the write up over the weekend with uke helping. We asked oon to help but he said he didnt want to stay up late so didnt help.

Then the most stressful 2 days come round. I devoted all of my free time towards the project, uke devoted most of his time and oon devoted 1 hour after school on one day. He said that he couldn't do one lunchtime but I found him in the ICT room playing games :/.

This didn't matter THAT much but what pissed me off is that he started boasting to all his friends about all the work I did and credited it as his own. At the actual event he said nothing during the presentation because he knew nothing about the project. HE DIDNT EITHER BOTHER TO READ THE WRITE UP HE WAS BOASTING ABOUT. What do people get out of taking credit for work other people did.

We didn't win anything and I wonder why

wow thanks for reading all this you deserve a sticker

Did I ever tell you kids about the time I worked for a company that got a contract to develop an iOS application around some object detection software that had been developed by another team?

Company I was working for was a tiny software consultancy, and this was my first ever dev job (I’m at my second now 😅). Nobody at the company has experience building mobile applications but CEO decides that the app should be written in React Native because _he_ knows React Native.

During a meeting with the client, CEO jokes about how easy the ask is and says he could finish it in a weekend. Please note that Head of Engineering had already budgeted a quarter for the work. CEO says we can do it in a week! And moves up the deadline. And only assigns two engineers to project. I am not one of those engineers.

The two engineers that are put on it struggle. A lot. They can’t seem to get the object detection to work at all, and the code that’s already written is in Objective-C. I realize one of the issues is that the engineers on the project can’t read Objective-C because they have no experience with Objective-C or even C. I have experience with C, so I volunteer to take a look at it to try to see what’s going on.

Turns out the problem is that the models are trained on one type of image format and the iPhone camera takes images in a different format.

The end of the week comes, they do not succeed in figuring out the image conversion in React Native. There’s an in-person demo with the customers scheduled for the next Monday. CEO spends the weekend trying to build the app. Only succeeds in locking literally every other engineer out of the project.

They manage to negotiate a second chance where we deliver what we were supposed to deliver at the original schedule.

I spent the weekend looking up how to convert images and figure it would be a lot easier to interface with the Objective-C if we used Swift. Taught myself enough Swift over the weekend to feel dangerous. Spoke to Head of Engineering on Monday and proposed solution — start over in Swift. Volunteer to lead effort. Eventually convince them it’s a good idea (and really, what’s the worst that can happen? If this solves our main problem at the moment, that’s still more progress than the original team made)

Spend the next week working 16 hour days building out application. Meet requirements for next deadline. Save contract.

And that’s ONE of the stories of my first dev job that got me hired as a senior engineer despite only having 10 months of work experience in the industry.

This rant is inspired by another rant about automated HR emails like "we appreciate your interest [bla bla] you got rejected [bla bla]". (Please bare with me).
I live in an underdeveloped country, I graduated in September, did Machine Learning for my thesis and I will soon publish a paper about it, loved it wanted to work as ML/data science engineer. On all the job postings I found there was only one job related, I sent resume, they didn't answer, couple months later that company posted that they want a full stack web dev with knowledge of mobile dev and ML, basically an all in one person, for the salary of a junior dev.
- another company posted about python/web scraping developer, I had the experience and I got in touch, they sent me a test, took me 3 days, one of the questions took me 2 days, I found an unanswered SO question with the exact wording dating to 6 months ago, I solved it, sent answers, never heard back from them again.
- one company weren't really hiring, I got in touch asking if the have a position, they sent a test, I did it, they liked it, scheduled an interview, the interviewer was arrogant, not giving any attention to what I am saying, kept asking in depth questions that even an expert might struggle answering. In the end they said they're not really hiring but they interview and see what they can find. Basically looking for experts, I mentioned that im freshly graduated from the very beginning.
- over 1000 applications on different positions on LinkedIn across the whole world, same automated rejection email, but at least they didn't keep me waiting.
- I lost hope. Found a job posting near me, python/django dev, in the interview they asked about frontend (react/vueJS) and Flutter, said I don't have experience and not interested in that, they asked about databases, C and java and other stuff that I have experience in, they hired me with an insulting salary (really insulting) cuz they knew im hopeless, filling 2 positions, python dev and tech support for an app built in the 90s with C/java and sorcery... A week into the job while I'm still learning about the app I'm supposed to support, the guy called me into the office: "here's the thing" he said, "someone else is already working on python, i want you to learn either react or vueJS or flutter" I was in shock, I didn't know what to say, I said I'll think about it, next week I said I'll learn react, so I spent the week acting like im learning react while I scroll on FB and LinkedIn (I'm bad, I know).
- in the weekend a foreign company that I applied to few weeks ago got in touch, we had some interviews and I got hired as DevOps/MLOps. It's been a month and I'm loving it, the salary is decent and I love what I do.
Conclusion: don't lose hope.

Hello World!

Migrating to my first Thinkpad (E585), something that I've wanted to do for a long time. I've heard a lot of great things and I wanted that sweeeet performance boost over my budget craptop (partially pictured).

> Ryzen 5 2500U
> RX Vega 8 integrated
> 8GB DDR4
> 256GB NVMe
> It's a thinkpad
> Runs Gentoo Linux and I swear I've spent the entire weekend learning and configuring it (my first time)

Client declined to allow billing over the weekend, demanded I work 20 hours. Task will be mysteriously blocked or delayed for the next two days as a result.

!dev (when do I ever post a dev related story? I only post about my personal life really)

For about 2 years I had a very good friend, and I had a huge crush on her for most of those 2 years. All of my junior year of high school, she dated my best friend, then they broke up the summer after because he'd cheated on her around the time they got together and she had found out. I was there for both of them during the breakup (it was fucking exhausting). The thing is, I was there for the girl more because I had a crush on her, and I started to consider her my best friend rather than her ex.

She knew I had a crush on her for a long time. But she still spent about a year going to parties every weekend, getting fucking hammered, and hooking up with random guys, then proceeded to tell me about it after. I can't count how many times she had to cancel plans because she got hammered the night before.

But I had a huge crush on her, so I essentially put her up on a pedestal, thinking she could do no wrong. Then we hit a point where we didn't talk for a couple months because I hit a low point and she was uncomfortable with me because of it. Around April we started talking again, immediately back to being best friends but my feelings for her came and went for a while. She had a huge crush on our other friend that had a girlfriend at the time. Life went on, she actually ended up being my first kiss while she was drunk one night (I was sober cause I was driving), but I started talking to a different girl a few days before then, so I was very conflicted about everything there.

Then a few weeks ago came. A different friend got a Radeon 5700 XT and I went over to his house to check it out and everything. We ended up talking for a while, and the conversation turned to my whole friend group that I hung out with all the time (the girl being the center of the group). That friend was never very fond of her, and he always made that very clear. Basically he made me realize that she's not perfect, and that I'd been seeing her through rose-colored glasses.

I spent a week or so rethinking our whole friendship, and I realized that she is nowhere near fucking perfect. For example, she ALWAYS has to be the center of attention. If our friend group is focusing on someone else for whatever reason, she essentially throws a fit then gets really quiet to get attention. Also she can't take criticism at all, she always acts like a victim if you try to criticize her in any way. I also feel like every time I tried to better myself in some way, she ended up bringing me down and making me feel like my problems aren't important. She uses her kindness as a weapon, such as "How could you say that about me? I've been nothing but kind to you!" And the list just goes on.

So, about a week ago, I told her that I feel like she's a toxic person, and she does nothing but bring people down over time, because that's truly how I feel. And of course, she couldn't take the criticism, and said "I don't even know why you feel that, I've been nothing but nice to you".

I haven't talked to anyone in that friend group in one week now. And I feel a lot better mentally. Being friends with her felt like a chore. Only one person in that friend group has tried to talk to me, and that was today. Nobody else has texted me or anything since last Monday. And I honestly couldn't care less. I feel like a huge chapter of my life is over, like the depressing chapter in a book.

I don't know how to end this. I'm doing fairly well now, been hanging out with coworkers a bunch lately. Life's actually kinda good for once.

Marketing pushed deadline for release one week earlier. That sucks.

What sucks even more is that frontend was not ready, but our frontend guy promised to take a look over the weekend and finish it. Thats cool we might make.

What sucks is that he fixed one small issue on Sunday 9PM and left the whole thing unusable.

So guess who was googling till 4am how to do stuff in bloody javascript?

In the end, I beleive I did a decent job and we ca release some kind of alpha and get rid of my dirty hacks later. That's how you get technical debt.

Now lets see what my boss thinks about it and if we are really going to release it or if I'm going to kill somebody.

!rant && extra('worried');

My 11 years-old brother seems to be addicted to Minecraft, not the "dis iz so kool" addiction, but the "I put my health and education in danger to keep playing this game (homeworks badly done, grades free falling, showers without soap in 30s flat, food eaten in 15s, starts to yell at parents when they want him to stop playing (parents bitch slapped him a few times for this, but he seems to persist)).

My parents are over 55 now, so they don't really know how to handle this (can't / don't want to blame them), and I'm supposed shove some reason in his dead brain next weekend (I live 150km away).
I've been addicted myself to videogames in general and WoW in particular ((almost) no regrets) a few years back.. what should I say to him else than "This shit will ruin your life even before you started it" (which is planned anyway) ?

So I had to use office and image editing tools on Linux today.
Holy mother fucking god are these things awful. Gimp, pinta, gnome paint, libre office, open office... they seem like a project some guy threw together a weekend in his bedroom. The UX is shite and makes 0 sense. They crash and lag all over the place. For fuck sake!
Also... Gimp, libre office and open office. If you want to make an alternative to a well known product (Photoshop and MS Office in this example) then just fucking copy the god damn UI as much as you can. No-one is going to go learn your fucking half ass product, people only use this shit because it's free and available on Linux.
I swear, I seriously considered sending the images to my phone and just fucking edit them there because it would have been so much easier than using this pile of shit.
Fuck!!!

Starting this week, we are gonna start "ScreenShotSunday" where devs will post screenshot of what he/she accomplished over weekend 🙌🏼 Don't forget to tag post with "ScreenShotSunday" ✌🏼️More details soon.

When you finally wake up on a weekend excited to work on your projects but your family is comming over for lunch (that will take up the whole afternoon too)...

Monday mornings.. Also known as.. What broke over the weekend and who can I blame?

The one that made me quit was when I was told I had to drive to the data centre and do a backup every day over the bank holiday weekend with no extra pay or time off. For no reason. And yes I know I'm an idiot for doing it but whatever.

The one that made me walk out, a month and a half later, was when I came in on Monday morning to discover that my boss had entirely rewritten the code I had spent literal months on in one weekend. Naturally he'd broken it and said it was an improvement.

Boss: Oh cool. You were coding all week to finish this project. Now you can finish this one over the weekend.

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

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

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

I just realized this is the "week" where I am on call for a week and a half. Over a 3 day weekend. Hoping my friends are free and can save me from my insanity...

!rant
tl;dr; quit my job last monday. going to grow my side hustle into full time freelancing.
I am so exited.

---
Story time:
I am working full time as a jack of all trades and also have a side business where I coach people on an ERP for doors/fenestration and also write custom software in c#.
I was able to manage both over ~4 years, with customer amount slowly growing (only doing B2B).

Last month I opened an account at a freelancer website just for the lulz and damn after a short amount of time the orders exploded. I had to shut it down again because I cannot manage the amount of work. But did manage to win a fair amount of customers that will keep me busy for the next year or two.

Spoke to my employer and told them about the situation (they know about my side business and it's all mentioned in the contracts). Said that I would need half the amount of hours with my business to reach the same amount of money and that working as an employee makes no sense for me in terms of money. I would however like to work 1 to 2 days in a week for them because working there is fun, even when its financially uninteresting.

they took one week to prepare a position and then invited me to a meeting. "we offer you 32 hours a week. if you want more, you have to make a descision. As a self employed person you have risk and we as an employer do not want to carry that risk for you and we do not want to finance your self employment" (etc.)

Thought I am in the wrong movie. I took that into the weekend and thought a lot about what has been said.

And last monday I invited to a follow up and told them

"sorry, I think I was not clear enough. Working for you is of no interest in terms of money. You do not finance me, it's the other way around. Sadly we do not come to an agreement, as 8 hours less does not fit the need. You said I need to make a descision. I do not want to do this but I'm quitting".

They responded with "Oh that is sad to hear. Is there anything that we can make so you do not leave?"

"Either pay me the same I would make as a self employed or follow my conditions"
Did not get a response on that.

I now have three months to prepare myself for self employment.
Currently working 40h + growing side business + getting the whole german bureaucracy shit together.

Tough time but hell this feels so damn good.

Just wanted to share this :)

Boss is also a programmer which is nice. boss is also incredibly impatient. so when he gives me a project to do, when I don't have it done the day of, he goes and does it over the weekend. but he doesn't tell until a few days later when I finish the following Tuesday. he chucked my git branch and just pushed his stuff to master. then he belittled me because there was a feature missing in his code and I hadn't done it yet. I don't know how to deal with this. on the one hand, I could try and work faster. but on the other, I am trying to add features to software he wrote in c-style c++, didn't comment, and hasn't been updated to modern standards since 1998. even the copyright files are 1997 to 2001. just very discouraged as its my first job in the field. it wouldn't have been so frustrating if he had just told me he'd worked on it himself instead of letting me finish it and then throwing it in the trash.

end rant

Other Dev: I worked really hard over the weekend to get the issue fixed, I raised a PR but it has a zillion merge conflicts. Would you mind taking a look at it?

Me: Ok. *Changes base branch away from Master.*

Other Dev: Whoa! How’d you fix them that so fast???

Me: Experience.

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

It's the FUCKING....
WEEEEEKKKKEEEEENNNNDDDD!!!!!!!!

I don't know about you lot, but it's felt like a long time coming since Monday morning.

Several concurrent projects pulling you in different directions take its toll.

Oh and to answer your question.
Yes, I am mentally unstable right now 🤪

!rant

Monday morning panic...the dreaded question.

Random office colleague: "Do anything fun over the weekend?"

Me internally: Fuck...what did I do? Did I do anything at all? I mowed the yard...played video games...spent 3 hours looking at some random open source package I gave up trying to compile. All that is boring though. Was there nothing exciting I can brag about? Fuck...oh wait. I went to a huge theme park Saturday. Yeah that's cool enough to mention!

Me: "No not really"

When your internal timezone automatically changes over the weekend and you have to get it back to "normal" but then somehow end up not sleeping at all 😅😐😑😪

Probably the MOST complete software book on a very broad subject.

This is book to read for those of you are near college grad, first job in the industry. But to the level of detail and broad coverage this book has I think it’s actually a great book for everyone in the industry almost as a “baseline”

From requirements, project planning, workflow paradigms. Software Architecture design, variable naming, refactoring, testing, releasing the book covers everything, not only high level but also in reference to C.

Why C ...because in the consumer electronics, automotive industry, medical electronics and other industries creating physical products c is the language of choice, no changing that. BUT it’s not a C book... it contains C and goes into dept into C but it’s not a C book, C is more like a vehicle for the book, because there are long established, successful industry’s built around it. Plenty of examples.

When I say it’s the most complete on a broad subject seriously like example the chapter about the C language is not a brief over like many other books, for example 10 pages alone are dedicated to just pointer! Many C books have only a few paragraphs on the subject. This goes on depth.

Other topics, recursion, how to write documentation for your code.

Lots of detail and philosophy of the construction of software.

Even if you are a veteran software engineer you could probably learn a thing or two from the book.

It’s not book that you can finish in weekend, unless you can read and comprehend over 1000 pages.

Very few books cover such a broad topic ALL while still going into great detail on those subtopics. the second part is what lacks in most “broad topic books” ..

Code Complete.. is definitely “Complete”

So the image doesn’t match the rest of my book images because I tried to make an amage to cover of the book, inception style kinda haha 😂

The layout for my little side project was working fine in IE last week. Made some server side additions over the weekend and now the layout is broken... in IE only. Guess who's putting in a user-agent redirect to a "Works best in Chrome or Firefox" page? 😉

Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.

Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.

I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.

Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.

Anyway, coming to the update part.

I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).

Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.

I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.

I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.

I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.

I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.

I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.

Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'

He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.

Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.

For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.

Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.

Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.

I have two observations I want to share with you all.

1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.

2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.

I now await for the feedback.

In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.

Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.

It went 1000x better than Facebook.

I await the feedback from them as well.

I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.

180° was for Booking.com

Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.

Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.

2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.

!dev, !rant
Flew to Berlin for the weekend. Kinda disappointed xD
Trash everywhere, water costs more then my kidney, ugly communist blocks and buildings everywhere(I mean, yeah, sure: GDR, but like what, did nobody build anything since then? lol), almost nothing to eat .-. (I don't think we encountered even a single "german food" place walking around Berlin)

On the flip side, roads are awesome, no construction everywhere that blocks half the roads, no cracks everywhere and the asphalt doesn't make you vibrate when you ride over it. People were nice and polite, I didn't get the overwhelming urge in stores/stalls to just place everything back on the shelves and fuck off just from talking to a cashier/clerk/worker. Food, drinks, and services were cheap as fuck(Except for water, which I'm still coping seething and malding over, I thought the "Beer cheaper than water" was a joke, or an idiom, not fucking reality).

Also got to see @Ranchonyx IRL <3
So that was the highlight of the vacation.

As a software house, we have many teams on different projects. One project was due to a Thursday, and the PM asked the team 1 week before if they could work over the weekend since there's a lot of things to do.

On the Friday before, one of the devs showed up a bit later than usual (around 10am), but ok...

After lunch he asked to talk to HR and also the boss. They talked for around 2h, then he started to say "goodbye and good luck" for everyone.

The project was on fire and he just... leave.

On the next 2 months another 4 people leave the company. All from the same team/project (but not with a big surprise like him).

Apparently, the team was constantly complaining to PM and boss about unrealistic deadlines and constant requirements changes, but they didn't did anything about it. Just when more than half this team had left the company they started to rethink this actions to this project and the others on the company.

I think I want to quit.

I know it’s a bit of an inconvenient time with there being corona around but everything was okay up till January. I’m a junior even though I shouldn’t be. Since my manager told me and my team leader senior in my review “maybe you two should switch jobs” things have been going downhill. I think the team lead had it out for me and didn’t put me on a new project, I’ve been left with doing stupid basic shit like updating text on websites in a cms and doing fuck all and then there’s also another guy that was basically harassing me trying to put me in my place any time I was doing better than him and literally both of them been like that ... and now that I’m working from home it’s even worse. I don’t have any kind of assurance that everything okay and actually I think I’m being framed as welll since I found keyloggers on my work laptop and deleted cleaned shit up the past two weeks and changed my WiFi security as there were like 5 unknown devices on our network so yeah .. I’ve been framed and they made it out like I put a powershell script on one of the servers and it crashed a Porsche website for 8 h and all kinds of bullshit - this was yday. On Tuesday they logged me out of everything like changed the password for work vpn and kicked me out of slack and Microsoft teams for over 2 hours till the end of shift and two managers weren’t answering their phone and then next day my manager called and apologised that saying that he “accidentally” did that to me along with 15 people they let go from the company....

I’m seriously thinking of quitting being removed from team group for a moment , not being on a project and people literally trying to put me down after I know I’m genuinely smarter than them and if I had over 10 years experience like those on my team (I have 1) I’d be far higher up and better

They can genuinely just go fuck themseves !!!! And here I was going to work over weekend on something! No fucking way I just wanna quit or give in my notice but because of corona I’m divided

Email from boss: Have a nice weekend everyone!

Colleague A's reply: The weather is gonna be bad...
PM: Oh then A, you can stay at home and make sure the sites are working over the weekend!

5 seconds later boss replied:
Oh enjoy watching the sites then!

I can tell you two are from the same pile of turd *smh*

How about that I get to work 30 hours over the weekend. Wish me luck!

my gf visited over the weekend. when she went out to get groceries I kept myself busy looking for a error on a project.
she came back and was like: did you fail to end a sentence with a period.
that solved the problem

So I promised myself some down time this weekend since I usually end up working all night and in a blink my weekend is over. I also declined going out for better 'relaxation'. Here's how it's going so far...

>Gets home. Hmmm what should I do I can do anything! *thinking*
>Pours a stiff whiskey
>Trys watching something as well as playing a game, gets bored of each and abandons them.
>Opens a dev newsletter
>*blinks*
>Realizes I'm elbow deep in some repo... starting to feel inspired.
>Decides to code something "fun"
>Uses "Well as long as I'm not *working*" to justify his addiction.

I'm really not sure what I did for fun before I started coding. It ruined things by being so damn enjoyable and ultimatley many other things became well... less fun.

This is what addiction looks like.

!rant

Chilled out with one of my non-programmer friends over the weekend. We were talking about various projects I had worked on, and he became interested. He started learning js that night, and I was proud.

Cut to today, he sends me a message complaining about some of the weird syntaxes in python. Super proud moment.

New boss gets us to work overtime, all weekend and till 9pm. Promising that we will get that time back.

We get the project through the door. His KPI looks great to his boss. He then slithers his way around hints about this time back. Someone confronted him today and he says he can't officially recognise the over time due to company policy. The fucker.

i am actually exciting to go to work tommorow.

Thats weird.

Over the weekend the gf was away and it was quite boring, gaming didnt do the thing so i relaxed quite a lot but i am somewhat excited to continue to work tomorrow, to further my project. I was able to stop to do nothing at home, but still..its a bit weird

a client i was doing a side project for recently hired another dev to finish my project apparently i wasn't fast enough for them; despite their late submition of asserts.now their "dev" fucked up everything i was building and they want me to take the project over the weekend..

positive vibes over weekend

Got to know about OSMC/Kodi last week. Took out my Raspberry Pi. Setup OSMC over the weekend, did all the cable setup for 4 external hard drives and connected to TV via HDMI. After few configurations, I'm all setup. I'm astonished by all the features it provides. Fetching data from TMDb (I had actually created a javaFX app to do this for my local library just last month), remote control from Android as well Web Browser. Enabled UPnP and now I have my complete media center floating around my house network. It is one of the best open source project I have laid my eyes upon. Wish I could attach more pics.

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

How long do my fellow devRanters spend per day coding? I will spend about 10 hours per day 6/7 days per week.

I ask this because I'm wondering if I need to re-balance my life choices. I took a whole day off
over the weekend and ended up feeling more rejuvenated coming back to my code this Monday.

My contract of working for the company (IbqhfErfrnepuCranatZnynlfvn) will end on 30 APR 2022. The reason was I quit due to an unrealistic deadline (eg, completing the entire e-commerce app similar to (Taobao, Shopee and Amazon) from scratch in a month that I just joined) and also due to an impatient boss with who I had to deal with his bad behaviour like over micromanaging of what I do at weekend and demanding me to work 24/7 and over time will not be paid.

Me: Hey, guys, this stuff is seriously flammable. Like, I’m surprised it hasn’t caught fire yet. I really want to clean it up. Here’s how I’d make it better.

Management: No. It’s fine, it works. Don’t touch it. It’s getting replaced anyway. Just add the things on top like we asked you to, and call it a day.

Me: Are you sure? This is seriously going to be a problem.

Management: We just said it’s getting replaced. Don’t. touch. anything. OK?

Me: alright.

… Eight weeks later …

Management: so this thing caught fire over the weekend, and the fire spread to other areas. We’re doing some emergency cleanup. The new guy looked at it and figured out why, and has some great ideas on fixing it, so give him some well-deserved praise!

Me: Hey! I told you about this months ago!

Management: Yes. I tuned out during today’s firefighting meetings. But it’s important to strike a balance in everyone’s style. Do you have any other concerns?

I started using Google Docs over the weekend working on my thesis paper for my CS degree. I've come to the conclusion that it's a suitable replacement for MS Office and my need for Microsoft's ecosystem. Don't know why I kept paying it for so long.

So I've been doing work for a big ass real estate firm. Managing work of their 12 websites. A month ago they sent a prototype built with React.js which their design agency did. What we did was creating a backend API and an administration area and hooked the prototype to make it dynamic.
Everything was working quite great but around 2-3 days ago their guy who had been looking over the work of this React.js website came up and said that it isn't working in Internet Explorer 11. Bastard didn't mention this earlier throughout the whole month when we had provided him access to a staging server. I coldly replied that the prototype was provided by their design agency. But today the fucker put it all on us and said that it is something we implemented that caused this issue. I had to do some research but I finally managed to run the website in IE11. Bastard tried to steal my weekend.
Fuck IE11, fuck such pig clients, fuck Microsoft. IE, just DIE already you syphilis infected piece of whore's ass!

Oh I've had loads (and still have) of projects that got me to learn cool stuff! To keep them separate, I'll post some in different rants.

The thing that has helped me most over time (it didn't teach me cool things but it's very useful in general) is that, when api's have rare limits and you need/want to use them more often than is really allowed: you write your own alternatives.

I've especially had this with a geoip api's. Needed one for nearly every project but hit the rate limits with every goddamn service.

Wrote my own in a weekend and no rate limit hitting since then!

Tomorrow is Monday again. That means the weekend is over.

Spend the last year helping to rescue a company from the brink of collapse. Literally live and breathe the company for no extra pay or reward, supporting and improving all aspects from IT and development, HR, Legal, Procurement, business day to day running and Accounts.

Create a business plan and forecast for 2019 with the General Manager over the weekend (unpaid) to grow the business and start to make lots of profit, hand it over to the director and he makes me redundant the next day.

Furious doesn't even cover what I'm feeling at the moment.

Didn't go to class on Friday cause some asshole broke into my car. Checked slack for my homework over the weekend before bed and...nothing.

Check slack 2 hours ago... huge project due in 7 hours... wtf slack thanks for no notification and updating my messages late as fuck...

Time to brew some coffee I guess.

Why is the interviewing process becoming worse over the years?

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

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

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

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

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

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

My cousin needed quick website and I could never turn him down for the kind of relationship I have with him. When I completed the web, he was like "how were you able to finish it over the weekend?". And I said, "it's all magic"

Keep this in mind: I don't like WordPress and PHP at all!!!
So a couple of days ago my boss asked me if I could extend a custom made WordPress plugin made by our intern. First thought: sure why not? Boss says: it has to be done in less than 100 hours of work (an estimate done by my boss and the intern). Me: I can't tell you that before I have seen the code and what functionality has to be in the extension. Boss: Cool, look it over this weekend and tell me if you want to do it or not.
I looked it through and my answer will probably be: NO WHERE IN HELL am I gonna are this in less that 100 hours! 1. no tests has been performed so I have absolutely no clue if his code works.
2. variable names are mostly: $string_query (whatever that means?), $result, $string_temp and so on.
3. Methods and functions are more than 250 lines long, with shitty formatting, and more comments than code. WTF?
4. The estimate has been made by an intern and my boss (doesn't know much about programming). I haven't been consulted about it....
5. No version control. No branches, no commits other than initial commit. Great.
6. Most comments in the code just tells me what I can read from the code. What it returns and what it takes as params. Can I please know wtf your method call named $booking->run () does? I still haven't found this method in the code after 1 hour of intensively looking for it...

FFS man... Not gonna do this, even though I thought it would have been an interesting project initially.

Sorry for the long rant... I just wish the intern would have consulted me about all this shit, since he obviously have bad practices. *sigh*

I kinda feel the pain of the developers over at Bungie. They just had over 15h downtime of Destiny 1 and 2 and had to stay up all night to fix it.

You did a good job - have a nice weekend :)

Group assignment in a software engineering class. Got that notorious lazy kid in my group of four who failed the class in the last term. I was perfectly aware of his reputation, but accepted him in the group nonetheless, because he already knows what needs to be done in the class.

He started to work on his assignment: mostly boilerplate code that didn't even build. He didn't even bother to fix it. I had a lot of time over the Easter weekend, so I decided to just code as much for the assignment as possible for the mid-term submission. I replaced his broken boilerplate stuff with a working solution. I told the others in the group chat about it. Code works and builds, test coverage is high. Everything is fine.

The lazy kid replied to the group chat, that if I'd wanted to code and document(!) everything on my own, I should have told him in the first place. Also got that "fuck off" emoji in the message. So I restored his broken boilerplate stuff using git, even fixed the build errors and told him to explain to me what he tried to achieve, and that I'd be happy to include his code as soon as it worked. Didn't hear anything since. Commits neither.

I guess he was just looking for an excuse for not doing additional work in the project.

Finishing up for the day and about to submit our app for review over the weekend. Everything's wrapped up nicely with a bow. Click Submit For Review. Head home for the long weekend.

Open up laptop hours later to check something, see iTunesConnect on the "Does this application use the IDFA advertising identifier" page.

😐

Oh yeah. There's another step. 😖

Probably had my worst half-week ever this week.

Customer's CRM system, the read and edit masks just...stopped existing on last week friday. CRM fell back on some default masks for the dataset. No way to create new masks directly without putting the whole system upside down.
We couldn't do anything anyway because they reported the issue literally as we all were about to leave for weekend and our boss was like "Ah nah, well do it next week."
Our brains were already fried anyway...
I mail the reporter that we've registered their issue, will investigate and report back ASAP once we've got news.

Monday rolls around, I'm whacking my head against their system trying to figure the fuck out, what went wrong and how to solve it, I come up empty; Not that terrible since the masks only stopped existing in the webclient version of the system and they can still use the windows client, so they can still work.

Tuesday rolls around, I'm at an on site training for an ERP system with my boss at a remote company. Get an email in midst of the training, I was doing protocol.
Guy from the afflicted company goes and tells me that the issue has somehow spread to his colleague and him...IN THE WINDOWS CLIENT.

I'm fucking flabbergasted, so to speak, since the masks for the windows client and the web client are totally isolated from one another.
After we're back at our company, I investigate, less efficiently this time because my brain got fried at the training. I come up empty again.

NOW TODAY: Discuss further proceedings with my boss, he's not pissed at me or anything, just to say, but we're both worried, obviously.

Then at 10:20, a guy from the afflicted company mails me in an annoyed tone that the masks are still broken.

11:00, we figure out a workaround so the windows client users can at least work again, albeit limited.

11:10, I mail the guy, telling him that although we're still not able to fully work everything out and are still investigating, we've made a workaround so they can at least work again.

11:20, the guy mails me in a pissed tone around the lines of "This is very very important and must be fixed ASAP or else we'll not be able to work at all [...]"
And I think like "Dude I literally just told you like 8 minutes ago that there's are workaround so you'll be able to at least work again..."

Forward the mail to boss, we meet up quickly to discuss how in God's name we can deescalate this mfer.

11:31, the guy mails me again, all apologetically this time "Stop! All is good, I just now fully read you mail, thanks for implementing the workaround, nothing will come to a standstill [...]"

BRUH CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ BEFORE ESCALATING SHIT

Fuck customers. Dumb fucking cretins unable to fucking read.

The issue is still unresolved. Support of the CRM software lets us sit on our collective asses and wait.

There is no such thing as stable software, it's a myth.

Every corporate software is like an ever-decaying semi-corpse of a brain dead patient slowly getting worse and worse but not fucking dying.

Rant over.

Leave the house for 30 fucking minutes and the courier attempts to deliver my new notebook just then---after four days in transit. And, of course, they don't deliver at the weekend.

I swear the guy was camped outside my house waiting to fuck me over.

So for the past 3 weeks I have been reporting that the development on X tickets has been completed and are deployed for testing.

Testers, fuck it we are not testing.
BA: yeah ok.

So nobody is testing.

And this Friday evening BA panics, starts emailing everybody, we need those items tested blah blah..

Now he is calling the testers over the weekend for testing 😂

And adds few more changes to requirements. (WTF)

Says:- He will also be testing over the weekend.

IT team :- Systems won't be working due scheduled maintenance. 😂😂 In your face BA

IT people best timing ever🤘

Hope he learns some prioritizing.

So I took over a project from another dev after he left the company and his project was currently in QA pending release. They were blocking it due to some issues around the persons information not appearing consistently. It turned out he wasn't persisting the persons information in the database with the actual record.

It would be as if when you ordered something on amazon and changed your address for a future shipment all shipments would show the new address. So it turned out QA had no idea how bad the problem was and they had pushed this issue to him to fix but he just wasn't fixing it.

When I reported the problem to my boss and due to the time constraints for release they authorized a contractor to come in to assist. I ended up writing a few classes and one table to persist the data and all of it was solved. I ended up fixing the problem in one weekend. Huge problem and I fixed it in just a few days.

My co-worker pointing out there is a problem with my code that isn't implemented 100% yet. Hinting she wanted me to finish it over the weekend.

Yeah FMDL.

Anyone else have people that seem to constantly try to "prove" themselves to you in this weird, competitive way that only makes them seem... very annoying? I'll call him Bob here, but it's always something like:

Bob: Hi Almond, how's it going?
Almond: Ah not bad thanks, PSU blew up in the PC over the weekend though so that was a bit of a faff!
Bob: Ah no! How old's your PC?
Almond: Oh, like 7-8 years old now. I don't replace it often.
Bob: Really?! I replace mine completely every year.
Almond: Ah, cool.
Bob: Yeah, I'm a dev so I feel I need to. It's like my tool, you know.
Almond: Sure thing!
Bob: I actually spend quite a lot on it. I make sure it's got the fastest memory I can afford. Like, DDR5 stuff. That's really important, you know.

...etc., while I try to get out of said conversation for the next eternity.

Or:

(while in a conversation about a frontend bug I was looking at in Chrome devtools)
Bob: Hey Almond, you know Firefox actually had a plugin that did all this stuff before everything else?
Almond: Err, yeah, I think so. Used it back in the day.
Bob: It was called firebug. It was really good. Revolutionary.
Almond: Certainly was.
Bob: It was launched in January 2006 you know.
Almond: Right...
Bob: I used it back then.

...I mean damn, I'm all for being civil, but no-one cares you replace your PC every year, or that you know the year firebug was released, or that you once set up 5 identical PCs with different versions of Linux to run some benchmarks...

>Be me
>Decide to contribute to an open source project for the first time
> Nothing big, just a simple compile error fix
>Make first ever pull request
>Over weekend pull request accepted
>feelsgoodman.jpg
>Take a look at recent commits
>Module I tweaked was finished in a commit 6 hours ago
>Fix no longer relevant

So close.. :(

Last Week Friday:
PM: We'll be taking you off the one project on to another, we'll send the details later.
Me: Cool

*Hours Later*

PM: Ok cool, so you'll be looking at a script that one of our Pillar heads has scripted. You need to make sure it works and that it can run on the server.
Me: *I always thought this guy was useless now i get to see what he can do* Cool, just send the documentation and i'll take a look at it over the weekend. Just tell me when you've sent it.
PM: Cool.
Project Head: I'll inform you when i send the files and how to run them.
Me: *I know how to set up a database locally, i'm not an idiot* Cool.

Whole Weekend I don't get a single message.

Monday Morning:
Project Head(PH): Have you taken a look at it yet?
Me: Taken a look at what?
PH: The Database and the Script
Me: i didn't get any message over the weekend.
PH: I sent it yesterday, it should be in your inbox.
Me: There's Nothing. Sending anything on a Sunday is expecting me not to see it, especially at 10pm. Besides i can't retrieve any of the files in the attachment(Outlook tripping), rather send it in a zip file or upload it to onedrive.

PH sends the link. I get the files, set up the DB, glance at the script.

Me: This is actually interesting.
PH: You know what it does?
Me: My SQL knowledge is below average but i can read and understand it pretty well. So your dynamically copying the database from the server to the warehouse, cool.
It's not going to work though.
PH: Check first.

I check it

Me: Doesn't work, but it sort of works.
PH: What do you mean?
Me: Some tables are populated but some aren't,, how and there's a shit tone of errors.
PH: So i does copy the data over.
Me: Some of the data.
PH: test it on the Server
Me: Not a good idea.
PH: Just try it.
PM: In the mean time i'll send you some documentation i need you to review and edit.
Me: *Idiots* Cool.

Tuesday:
Me: Have you checked it on the server yet?
PH: Not yet, busy.
Me: Where's the documentation again?
PM: I'll send it it a moment.
Me: In the mean time i'll write some script to fix that script that's definitely not going to work.

Wednesday:
Boss: I heard you done with the script
Me: It's not done, but we'll be testing it on the server later.
Boss: Then why are you running it on the server?
Me: Ask the PH and PM.
Boss: What are you doing now?
Me: Well i'm supposed to do documentation *looks at PM* but i haven't recieved any yet, so I've been writing a script to fix the copy script.
PH: Ok we'll test when the boss leaves, after all the meetings.
PM: here's the documentation.
Me: Thanks

I start on documentation.

PH: It didn't work.
Me: I know.
PH: Fix it.

Thursday:
Meeting.
PM: What you doing?
Me: Fixing the script,
PM: Do the documentation first
Me: Cool.

End of the day:
PH: Why you doing the documentation? The script has highest priority.
Me: Ask the PM.

Friday(Today):
Boss: can we talk.
Me: Sure.
Boss: I though you said the script was done?
Me: i said it sort of works, just doesn't do the job 100%.
Boss: Monday i was told it's done.
Me: i only looked through it Monday to understand it, i done nothing before Tuesday. though i have been trying to create a script to fix it.
Boss: Your working really slow hey.
Me: *It's been a week, and stupid people are in charge* I was doing what i was told.
Boss: Cool.(His Upset)

Stupid FUCKEN people, make stupid FUCKEN decisions. But Hey, the boss only see's the final result. I am a human being, even i make mistakes. But there's a huge gap between stupidity and a mistake.

That moment when you realize your team-mate pushes code to PROD on Friday evening
but you are the one on pager rotation over the weekend...

I HATE SURFACES SO FRICKING MUCH. OK, sure they're decent when they work. But the problem is that half the time our Surfaces here DON'T work. From not connecting to the network, to only one external screen working when docked, to shutting down due to overheating because Microsoft didn't put fans in them, to the battery getting too hot and bulging.... So. Many. Problems. It finally culminated this past weekend when I had to set up a Laptop 3. It already had a local AD profile set up, so I needed to reset it and let it autoprovision. Should be easy. Generally a half-hour or so job. I perform the reset, and it begins reinstalling Windows. Halfway through, it BSOD's with a NO_BOOT_MEDIA error. Great, now it's stuck in a boot loop. Tried several things to fix it. Nothing worked. Oh well, I may as well just do a clean install of Windows. I plug a flash drive into my PC, download the Media Creation Tool, and try to create an image. It goes through the lengthy process of downloading Windows, then begins creating the media. At 68% it just errors out with no explanation. Hmm. Strange. I try again. Same issue. Well, it's 5:15 on a Friday evening. I'm not staying at work. But the user needs this laptop Monday morning. Fine, I'll take it home and work on it over the weekend. At home, I use my personal PC to create a bootable USB drive. No hitches this time. I plug it into the laptop and boot from it. However, once I hit the Windows installation screen the keyboard stops working. The trackpad doesn't work. The touchscreen doesn't work. Weird, none of the other Surfaces had this issue. Fine, I'll use an external keyboard. Except Microsoft is brilliant and only put one USB-A port on the machine. BRILLIANT. Fortunately I have a USB hub so I plug that in. Now I can use a USB keyboard to proceed through Windows installation. However, when I get to the network connection stage no wireless networks come up. At this point I'm beginning to realize that the drivers which work fine when navigating the UEFI somehow don't work during Windows installation. Oh well. I proceed through setup and then install the drivers. But of course the machine hasn't autoprovisioned because it had no internet connection during setup. OK fine, I decide to reset it again. Surely that BSOD was just a fluke. Nope. Happens again. I again proceed through Windows installation and install the drivers. I decide to try a fresh installation *without* resetting first, thinking maybe whatever bug is causing the BSOD is also deleting the drivers. No dice. OK, I go Googling. Turns out this is a common issue. The Laptop 3 uses wonky drivers and the generic Windows installation drivers won't work right. This is ridiculous. Windows is made by Microsoft. Surface is made by Microsoft. And I'm supposed to believe that I can't even install Windows on the machine properly? Oh well, I'll try it. Apparently I need to extract the Laptop 3 drivers, convert the ESD install file to a WIM file, inject the drivers, then split the WIM file since it's now too big to fit on a FAT32 drive. I honestly didn't even expect this to work, but it did. I ran into quite a few more problems with autoprovisioning which required two more reinstallations, but I won't go into detail on that. All in all, I totaled up 9 hours on that laptop over the weekend. Suffice to say our organization is now looking very hard at DELL for our next machines.

The most annoying hack I've had to deal with was back when I did IT support, actually. Level 1 call center tech at the time. Apparently someone fell for a phishing email and gave out his outlook credentials. The phisher used that email account to send out another phishing email to roughly 1800 employees.

Security Operations noticed, because this guy's job didn't generally involve sending out mass-communication emails. They investigated, figured out what had happened, and opted for the nuclear option: they reset the password for EVERY SINGLE ACCOUNT that received the email. All 1800 of them. Over the weekend.

I walked into the call center Monday morning and checked the call stats, then did a double-take. There were over 300 people waiting in the queue. I almost left and called in sick. Turns out it wasn't that bad though. Annoying to reset so many passwords and having no downtime due to the full queue, but on the other hand my stats were better that day than any other, since every call was a 5-minute password reset.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*leaning back in the story chair*

One night, a long time ago, I was playing computer games with my closest friends through the night. We would meet for a whole weekend extended through some holiday to excessively celebrate our collaborative and competitive gaming skills. In other words we would definitely kick our asses all the time. Laughing at each other for every kill we made and game we won. Crying for every kill received and game lost. A great fun that was.

Sleep level through the first 48 hours was around 0 hours. After some fresh air I thought it would be a very good idea to sit down, taking the time to eventually change all my accounts passwords including the password safe master password. Of course I also had to generate a new key file. You can't be too serious about security these days.

One additional 48 hours, including 13 hours of sleep, some good rounds Call of Duty, Counter Strike and Crashday plus an insane Star Wars Marathon in between later...

I woke up. A tiereing but fun weekend was over again. After I got the usual cereals for breakfast I set down to work on one of my theory magic decks. I opened the browser, navigated to the Web page and opened my password manager. I type in the password as usual.

Error: incorrect password.

I retry about 20 times. Each time getting more and more terrified.

WTF? Did I change my password or what?...

Fuck.

Ffuck fuck fuck FUCKK.

I've reset and now forgotten my master password. I completely lost memory of that moment. I'm screwed.

---

Disclaimer: sure it's in my brain, but it's still data right?

I remembered the situation but until today I can't remember which password I set.

Fun fact. I also could not remember the contents of episode 6 by the time we started the movie although I'd seen the movie about 10 - 15 times up to that point. Just brain afk.

My lead always steal my work and showcase it has his work to the manager. I always look for a chance to trap him in front of Manager.

One fine day, He gave me an work which has to completed on Monday, I sit over the weekend and finished it’s but partially committed it.

He is a blind thief, As always he says that he himself completed over the weekend.

While running in front of the manager they face huge issues because it’s a half cooked product. Manager purposely sent an email to our team without mentioning the name of my lead.

After few days my lead silently put paper and left the team.

The interview wasn't so bad, but it was deceiving, not to the fault of the company though. During the interview process, they were asking all sorts of questions about my Angular and front-end skills. I was to take over a project that used Angular heavily, and none of their devs knew angular. At the time, this was going to be my dream job! After I got the job, and met with the contractor who was handing over the project. He told me that he spent that weekend rewriting the whole thing on rails and ember. When I brought it up with my boss, he was not happy. I would have been fine working on it, but instead I got put onto Wordpress projects with the evergreen promise that I would transition to that project or another one like it. Never happened, built up my skills contributing to Open Source, then left.

This week we had a live production issue that our staff were catching/fixing on the fly. We're a relatively small software team without any direct external customers, so this is not too unusual.

Unfortunately, the person in charge of dealing with these issues didn't resolve it during the work week, so we were stuck with it over the weekend. Said responsible employee left at 2:30 on Friday without figuring out how we'd deal with the problem without any staff in the office to intercept problem cases. Better yet, he drove all the way back, and was there from 3:30 to 4 and promptly left again without telling the rest of the team what was going on with the production issue. We asked how it happened, what it was, etc, but didn't focus on his fix (in hindsight, a mistake).

Since it's his job, I assumed that he would let us know what was up before he left on Friday. It turns out that he never addressed the production issue at all and just decided to leave.

A junior developer and I spent two hours contacting management (who, at this time are already at home with their families) to get clearance to either shut the system off or fix it. No one wants to give it and no one that's high enough up to approve the decision is available.

In the end, we asked the weekend mechanical support team (some friends of mine) to monitor the issue and they kindly accepted.

All of this could have been avoided if my coworker had either told us his plan earlier (so we could ask about the lack of coverage), gotten approval to shut it down for the weekend, or covered his own ass before he left for the day.

Ugggh. I get that we all make mistakes, but I really hope this guy shapes up soon.

Not specifically a Dev job, but I did do a bit of development at this wifi startup. It was a wifi shop where we set up wifi for hotel clients all over the US. Anyways, they said I would make great money doing "on call" support, and me being an intern and naive I said absolutely I'd do it. Well 3 months later I was put on call essentially every day and one weekend I was with my mother and it was her birthday. At her party at this nice restaurant, with all of our close friends/family, I got a call. It took me 45 minutes to solve because of how idiotic the clients were, and after that I got 4 more calls equally as frustrating and long throughout that night. I asked for help from employees, the owner, ANYONE. Nobody helped. Needless to say I emailed the owner and said farewell that following Monday.

Lmao probably the time I worked 150 hours over two weeks (had to sleep on the job) for a project. During delivery I worked 09-22 during the weekend (unpaid) while my boss was out on his boat.

I'm often asked if I enjoyed my time in college. Of course I did. Loved learning how to code, and had a great rapport with the lecturers. I remember our conversations fondly:

Me: Funny story, over the weekend I was out with friends an...
Lecturer: You have friends?

How to deal with situations when in work people are overstepping personal boundaries too much?

My situation is that 2 months ago I started working in a very small startup and it currently consist of 3 ceos(main ceo, marketing ceo, product manager) and 3 employees (backend, android and ios).

What I currently dread is tea breaks. There is one at monday before work which lasts for 1 hour. And there is another one at Friday after lunch which lasts 1 hour again. I hate these Friday talks about "what are your plans for the weekend" which then triggers a circlejerk of ppl trying to impress each other about what they are going to do on their weekends. Same happens on mondays they circlejerk about how their weekend was amazing.

My situation is that I came to this country just to get skills and make shit ton of money when Im at it. Besides my fulltime work, I also am freelancing part time in my previous gig and also Im managing 2 other hobbie projects. I like to keep myself occupied during weekends so they usually consist of shopping/pc repairs/gym/working on my hobbie projects.

So basically when I tell them what I've done over the weekend the ceo's don't seem to be impressed so they start suggesting me to do something else. I completely loose any motivation of sharing my personal life when they start telling me what to do with my life.

I don't feel like exploring the city or meeting new people since maximum Im going to stay in this country is 6-9 more months. Then I'm probably going back to my own country.

Anyways even overall, I started dreading this companies culture. The politeness is so fake. For example there is an employee which has worked 3 years for them and the ceos haven't even increased his salary. I joined 2 months ago and I get paid more than him! They dont value loyalty at all since immigrants can be replaced easily. Another example: 2 weeks ago it was my birthday and no one from ceos even shook my hand, for them it was normal to just say happy bd during a standup.

So fking weird. I feel like I'm seeing redflags every day and not sure how long more I can stay here.

So I got in contact with a recruiter who said they have a possible job for me. The catch is it's in c# (I am a python java dev) and that there is a assessment test for the language to test for competency. I told the recruiter that's fine but I would need a week to highlight the main differences between the two languages and at least do a couple of educational programs for my learning sake. All was fine and that was the plan.
The next day the recruiter notifies me that the test is being called off on account of the company being swarmed. So the recruiter then proposes another similar test (in c#) the recruiter will use to measure my skills and that the recruiter will send the test via email that same day. Later that day I check my email and don't see the test. So I message the recruiter and never get a response. Next day comes and I decide to give the recruiter a call; no response. I then wait until the next day and message him on linkedin that I still needed the test. Linkedin was showing he read the message, but of course didn't respond.
I told my brother about this and he said to send a message saying: "Hi [recruiters name] because of the lack of further feedback I decided to go with another opportunity. Best regards, Lane"
After I send it I get a message the next day from the recruiter saying: "Hey, sorry I haven't gotten back to you. We had to install a new phone system yesterday so it was a busy day."
"I'm going to send it to you today so that you can look at it over the weekend. "
I can't help but think the recruiter is full of shit, but I may be jumping to conclusion. I know they can have a busy schedule, but if you have time to look at a message on linkedin how long would it take to type a short message explaining what's going on? I would like to know any opinions or insights on this.

Saturday morning. 10am.
Me: happily sleeping on the sofa in a friend's apartment.
Boss calls: 'oh did I wake you up? Can you please develop this mockup over the weekend?'

Being half asleep I agreed.

Well. After 7h without any break it is done. But one Saturday is lost and I'll never get it back :(

"It's very unfortunate that someone has to sit 10 hours a day on a computer screen but that's what we are paying for."
Working with an EU client.
Task is in stages beginning from assessment of an 9 year old Salesforce instance, cleanup and then transition to lightning.
The deliverabale in the first stage is excel sheet - objects(2400+), fields, apps, packages, profiles(110k), users, perm sets, apex classes, triggers, pages, s-controls and insert each and everything that a Salesforce instance could have.
Each and every data needs to be, analyzed and documented with our recommendations before being sent over. (Finding duplicates in 110k profiles??)
Oh, did I tell you, this was to be done four weeks? Weekend goes to hell.
That's when this beautiful motivational line comes up from the bridge, "It's very unfortunate that someone has to sit 10 hours a day on a computer screen but that's what we are paying for."
Fortunately(un?), that part of project is done and over with.

Now comes the clean up, identify packages not being used, remove them, qa and then push for deployment.
Mind you, this project is to be 2 weeks long. Its Friday of the first week today. And I am still working weekends.
Can I say, FML?

What you guys gonna work over weekend? Any exciting stuff?

client emails they are furious that changes were pushed at end of day and we broke the website. Being up at 11:30pm to fix changes to make client happy so they can test website over weekend for a Tuesday launch.

*background: client has told account manager he's not paying any more money till his site is done, not only is it the most in-depth WordPress site we've made, but we'll beyond the scope of the signed contract. He sent a few more edits over the weekend which I ignored because we have a team meeting later to discuss he client and where to go from here.

account manager comes in and says he has a call from client looking for me. I tell him that he should probably take a message as I'm not in the mood to be belittled by the client and we have a meeting later to discuss him anyways, we'll call him back.

AM: Come on, he says it'll only take a second and I'll be here so we can do it on speaker.

he transfers the call and we start talking in my office, before the client has even finished his first remark, the AM has left the room. Now we have the least social person in the office talking to the client when both parties are less than happy.

I managed to keep my cool and not tell the client to fuck off, and made sure I was clear about not promising any of his new edits.

Phrases like "that will take time and money" were used a lot.

There may be shots fired at the meeting later.

From writing back-end with expressJS to find out how mountain goat climbs near vertical peaks.

My productivity over this weekend is not looking good so far.

I fucked up. I used the shebang line #!/usr/bin/env python3 in a script that was being ran every 5 minutes with a cron job. This generated an email to a system that dropped a file for processing and sent an age email for each file every minute. Because the Linux OS generated emails didn’t contain a keyword the script closed by design but I forgot to uncomment the delete temp file line. This started on Wednesday before a 4 day weekend. By the time I got in on Monday I was 40GB over my email quota and receiving 2500 emails a minute. I fixed the script and stopped the emails but down I have to clear out those emails. Here it is Wednesday and I am deleting 1 MB every 3 seconds. This is painful.

So after 7 months of soul crushing searching I was able to land an awesome job I never thought I'd get! I didn't really get hired for my projects, I think I was more of a culture fit that knew enough of what they were talking about. My colleagues are awesome, helpful people but they are also clearly way ahead of me as devs. I know that many new hires have similar feelings and it's more a matter of drive + time. I understand that and I'm ready for the marathon ahead of me but I have one HUGE concern... I don't understand unit testing. I've never written unit tests in JavaScript or Java (just on paper I wrote random assert statements for a college exam question that somehow turned out correct). More importantly, I don't understand when to write unit tests and what my main objectives should be when writing them. At work they talk about unit testing like it's just as basic as understanding version control or design patterns, both of which I have had no problems asking questions about because I at least understood them generally. I come here looking for resources, mainly things I can go through over the weekend. I understand that I'm going to have to ask my colleagues for help at some point but I DON'T want to ask for help without any solid base knowledge on unit testing. I would feel much more comfortable if I could understand the concepts of unit testing generally, and then ask my team members for help on how to best apply that knowledge. I'm sorry for begging, I'll definitely be looking for resources on my own too. But if anyone could point me to resources they found to be helpful & comprehensive, or resources that they'd want their co-workers to use if they were in my position I would be very grateful!!!!

So let me get this straight: Minecraft Bedrock edition is essentially Microsoft being like "lol let's just quickly recode what they did over the years in Java, but in C++ and in a weekend"?

What a fucking flex.

Therapy is hardest when you're starting it IMO. I don't like talking about my vulnerabilities with people face to face very much, I get pretty defensive about it. We've agree that I'm suffering from a high level of anxiety which is likely leading to depression and we'll be working on solutions in the coming weeks.

Over the weekend I stopped programming and dedicated myself to more leisure. Went out for a hike (literally) and got a PS4, my first new gaming machine in over two years. Been playing Horizon Zero Dawn.

I'm starting to feel a little bit better. :)

TLDR; macOS wouldn’t update to the version I needed because I have a 3rd party SSD. All I needed was a firmware update only found deep within a google search and a secondary SO answer.

I have a video edit project this weekend. No big deal.

Except that the Final Cut Pro project was saved in the latest version of FCPX, for which I need latest MacOS version

As a music producer on the side, I had heard the new file system of MacOS High Sierra would possibly break audio plugins. I didn’t bother updating until now. Looked further into plugin problem, it would be simply a broken hard link which I can easily fix. No big deal.

Except that I have upgraded my MBP SSD from 256gb to this 3rd party 480gb SSD. macOS does not recognize this SSD as compatible with update. No big deal. Simple google search for a terminal command would do the trick.

Except that I found and tried several solutions, including wasting an entire hour updating the original ssd and booting from that to try to update it.

Nothing worked, but deep down in the google search, found in a secondary answer on SO, there was a link for a beta release of a firmware update for the SSD that took two minutes to install, and I was finally able to update.

That firmware update needs to be more prominent everywhere. Wasted well over 3-4 hours updating crap, swapping out SSDs, and googling when all I needed was a fucking firmware update.

This 3 day weekend couldn’t come at a better time! Today has done everything it can to delay it and everything has been a superb annoyance!

It started off with our internal systems going down, a frustratingly tedious project proposal process, our phones went down, off the wall calls to support all day causing them to ask me junk.

As a parting gift the pending windows update and it completely crashed my development VM and corrupted my install of virtual box. I had planed in only working a half day, but worked 6.5 hours, hit traffic al over. Was late to the event.

Not I get here and there’s a bunch of smokers outside and I could reallllllly use a drag. But I’m not gonna. 😒

Just ready to kick back and do non computer things til Tuesday. 😎

It's not really an 'app' or a 'start up' but over the weekend I build my own personal website:

neilmunro.herokuapp.com

I'll link all my other projects into this site.

What you working on over weekend?