"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"

So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.

First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.

So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.

Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?

I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.

Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?

"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"

So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.

More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!

I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.

And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.

"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."

You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!

"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."

I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.

So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

- Hello! Gordon's pizza?
- No sir it's Google's pizza.
- So it's a wrong number?
- No sir, Google bought it.
- OK. Take my order please ..
- Well sir, you want the usual?
- The usual? You know me?
- According to our caller ID, in the last 12 times, you ordered pizza with cheeses, sausage, thick crust
- OK! This is it
- May I suggest to you this time ricotta, arugula with dry tomato?
- No, I hate vegetables
- But your cholesterol is not good
- How do you know?
- Through the subscribers guide. We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years
- Okay, but I do not want this pizza, I already take medicine
- You have not taken the medicine regularly, 4 months ago, you only purchased a box with 30 tablets at Drugsale Network
- I bought more from another drugstore
- It's not showing on your credit card
- I paid in cash
- But you did not withdraw that much cash according to your bank statement
- I have other source of cash
- This is not showing as per you last Tax form unless you got it from undeclared income source
-WHAT THE HELL? Enough! I'm sick of Google, Facebook, twitter, WhatsApp. I'm going to an Island without internet,where there is no cell phone line and no one to spy on me
- I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport as it has expired 5 weeks ago..

My Friend: Dude our Linux Server is not working anymore!

Me: What? What did you do?

My friend: Nothing I swear!

Me: But you were last on it?

My friend: Yes. I just wanted to run a bash file and needed to give it permissions.

Me : WHAT DID YOU ENTER???!

My Friend: Chill man, just this command I found on the internet
chmod -R 600 /
chown -R root:root /

Me: WHY ARE YOU EVEN IN ROOT AND GOD DAMMIT WHY ARE YOU EVEN USING SOME RANDOM COMMAND FROM THE INTERNET. YOU KNOW YOU SHOULD NOT DO THIS OR JUST ASK!

My friend: Ok I did something wrong, how can I fix it?

Me: Did you make a backup or rsync of the server?

My friend: No. I just wanted to run this file.

Me: You holocausted the server. FUCK MY LIFE

So this fucking happened today.

Me: *sees support ticket coming in about some kind of login issue*

Me: *opens issue*

"Hello, I can't seem to login. There's an error"

Me: *sighs and thinks "at least give me that FUCKING error message then." *kindly replies with asking if they could send me the error message*

"Here it is. I don't understand what is going wrong
and what I have to do"

Me: *looks at error message*

"Invalid customer ID. Please make sure that your ID is correct. You can find it in the activation email we sent you when you registered".

😐 😶 😦

Me: *thinking okay what the fuck, are you fucking retarded or something?*

Me: *kindly replies: "It seems that you are not using the correct customer ID. You might want to look for it in the activation email we sent you!"*

"Oh okay thanks, how did you figure that out?"

Me: 😵 😐 😶 😭 🔫

Seriously what the actual fucking fuck.

I was told that my comment on another rant needed to be its own rant. So here it is:

I had a client that runs a tattoo shops website to be updated and more modern. He wanted nothing to do with looking at or approve mock ups or designs so I just did my thing and took care of it. Once I was finished I showed him what I had and said “now I just need some content from you all so I can replace all the placeholder text and images”.
He seemed completely onboard. Took down notes of all the content needed, assigned all of it out to his artists to gather what I needed and provide it to me.
After 6 months, and several emails asking if they ever got that content together I finally get a response:
“LOOK MAN, if you didn’t want to do the site then you shouldn’t have accepted the money. I know you don’t need all these from us to finish up, you’re just stalling! I need the site up now!”
So I’m like “Sure man, I’ll publish it exactly as it stands now.”
An hour later I get a call “who are these people in these pictures? Why do you have our pricing all wrong? Why is everything in French or something (Lorem ipsum)? I just need my money back at this point.”
I explained that he’s not getting his money back because I already did my part, but just because it’s important to me that a client is satisfied (and seemingly what he wants is money) I can waive his hosting fee for the next 3 years.
It’s been a year now. Sites still up in all “French”, wrong pricing, random stock photos. Couple weeks ago he called to apologize for being a dick before.
Still haven’t gotten any content to finish up.
I don’t understand. It’s like these people think if you want to publish a book for instance that you just give the publisher the title you came up with and they’ll fill in the pages with story/info for you.
I’m a web developer, not a content manager.

*computer fell, broken in pieces*

Me calling [Microsoft] tech support: hey can you check my warranty on this computer, I think I broke it?

Tech support: yes sir but we must first go through the troubleshooting steps,

Me: no, no I just-

Tech support: have you tried pressing F8 sir?

Me: umm… no, look I'm just -

Tech support: sir please press the F8 key sir

Me: okay… I pressed it, now can you just check my-

Tech support: sir please what happened when you pressed F8?

Me: it's broken, now if you could just check my warranty -

Tech support: sir I'm sorry sir I think you did it wrong. Please press F8

Me: no just check my-

Tech support: sir I think you do not understand, sir it is at the top-

Yup.

Frack he did it again.
In a meeting with the department mgr and going over a request feature *we already discussed ad nauseam* that wasn’t technically feasible (do-able, just not worth the effort)

DeptMgr: “I want to see the contents of web site A embedded in web site B”
Me: “I researched that and it’s not possible. I added links to the target APM dashboard instead.”
Dev: “Yes, it’s possible. Just use an IFrame.”
DeptMgr: “I thought so. Next sprint item …what’s wrong?…you look frustrated”
Me: “Um..no…well, I said it’s not possible. I tried it and it doesn’t work”
Dev: “It’s just an IFrame. They are made to display content from another site.”
Me: “Well, yes, from a standard HTML tag, but what you are seeing is rendered HTML from the content manager’s XML. It implemented its own IFrame under the hood. We already talked about it, remember?”
Dev: “Oh, that’s right.”
DeptMgr: “So it’s possible?”
Dev: “Yea, we’ll figure it out.”
Me: “No…wait…figure what out? It doesn’t work.”
Dev: “We can use a powershell script to extract the data from A and port it to B.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell, good…Next sprint item…”
Me: “Powershell what? We discussed not using powershell, remember?”
Dev: “It’s just a script. Not a big deal.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell sounds like a right solution. Can we move on? Next sprint item….are you OK? You look upset”
Me: “No, I don’t particularly care, we already discussed executing a powershell script that would have to cross two network DMZs. Bill from networking already raised his concern about opening another port and didn’t understand why we couldn’t click a link. Then Mike from infrastructure griped about another random powershell script running on his servers just for reporting. He too raised his concern about all this work to save one person one click. Am I the only one who remembers this meeting? I mean, I don’t care, I’ll do whatever you want, but we’ll have to open up the same conversations with Networking again.”
Dev: “That meeting was a long time ago, they might be OK with running powershell scripts”
Me: “A long time ago? It was only two weeks.”
Dev: “Oh yea. Anyway, lets update the board. You’ll implement the powershell script and I’ll …”
Me: “Whoa..no…I’m not implementing anything. We haven’t discussed what this mysterious powershell script is supposed to do and we have to get Mike and Bill involved. Their whole team is involved in the migration project right now, so we won’t see them come out into the daylight until next week.”
DevMgr: “What if you talk to Eric? He knows powershell. OK…next sprint item..”
Me: “Eric is the one who organized the meeting two weeks ago, remember? He didn’t want powershell scripts hitting his APM servers. Am I the only one who remembers any of this?”
Dev: “I’m pretty good with powershell, I’ll figure it out.”
DevMgr: “Good…now can we move on?”

GAAAHH! I WANT A FLAMETHROWER!!!

Ok…feel better, thanks DevRant.

I think I'm losing my mind working in the IT Department. 😂 Sometimes the questions are UNBELIEVABLE!

Client: Hi, my computer is not working.

Me: Hi, what's wrong with it?

Client: IDK. It won't work.

Me: Alright, what do you see on your screen?

Client: Nothing!

Me: Nothing as in there are no icons on your desktop or black screen?

Client: Oh, black screen.

Me: Is your monitor on? Do you see a light on the power-on button?

Client: Yes, it's white.

Me: Ok, good. What about your computer? Is it turned on?

Client: Well, I never turn off my computer so I assume it's on. I leave it as is when I leave the office then log-in in the morning when I come in.

**At this point I realized this person doesn't even lock the computer until it locks by itself after a while.

Me: Ok please turn on your computer by pressing the power button with a thin line on it. It should turn white.

Client: Ok but as I said I don't turn it off so why should I turn it on? Did it turn off by itself?

Me: That can happen.

Client: Ok....oh wait, it working! Thank you so much. Sorry if I was a little pain. I am a little stressed out this morning.

Me: No problem. Glad it worked. Have a good day.

*Hangs up confused. I mean really confused. Smh

I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

Linux sucks.

Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:

1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.

2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.

3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?

4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).

5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!

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

Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.

I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.

But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.

Me, a junior dev: * reports an important issue and a possible fix *

Senior dev 1: nah, it'll do just fine.

Senior dev 2: that won't be an issue, don't you see? It's under control, man.

Senior 3: why are you even here? Why are you even talking?

Manager: yeah, what could possibly go wrong?

* a year after releasing the product, one of the seniors got fired and another one was hired *

New senior: this thing is bananas, code is inconsistent and there's memory leaks everywhere, how does that even work?

Me: nobody believed me when I said that.

Manager: it did work very well, where's the issue?

Me: it's everywhere, goddammit! Don't you see?

New senior: junior dev is right.

Me: I've been a WHOLE YEAR saying that!

Manager: did you? Really? Nah, you didn't.

...

I'm tired of this shit.

Sent an email out in work informing everyone that we had pushed updates out to all Windows PC's.

Got the following phone call 10 minutes later:

"Hi, I can't log into the banking account app on my iPhone. Did you do something to it with your updates?"

"Nope. They were PC updates."

"Well, I'm sorry but you're wrong. It must be you! It was working yesterday."

"Again, it's not us. What's the error message you're getting on your app?"

"Invalid password"

".....then could it just be that you're entering an invalid password?"

"No, I know the password. I only changed it yesterday!"

"So it was working before you changed the password?"

"That's what i said!
I'm telling you, it's your updates."

"Okay but before we go 'troubleshoot' it, how about ringing your bank firs-"

"Oh look, it doesn't matter if you don't want to help, I don't have time for this!
I'll ring your boss and he'll uninstall the updates for me and fix the app." *hangs up*

LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

Summary of the summary: Boss is an asshole. Root gets angry; boss leaves instead of picking a fight for once. This makes Root sad (and really angry).

Summary: Root has another interaction with her boss. The boss is an asshole. Root is a bitch. Root would have been so so so much more of a bitch if the boss actually fucking responded. Root is sad this didn't happen. Root might have gotten fired. That would have made Root happy. :<

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

Le wild blackout appears!

-- Conference call (the short-short version) --
Boss: *freaks out* Fix it! Why aren't you fixing it? You have to fix it.
Me: I'm already fixing it. 😕
Boss: You have to fix it! This is important!
Me: Then let's get off this call so I can focus on fixing it!
Boss: Okay but fix it! *begrudgingly hangs up*

-- Slack --
Me: (posting a running log of what I'm doing) This is what i discovered. this is the cause. these are the possible fixes. I picked this one because it's quick and has few consequences, though it may break ____ so it'll need followup fixes. I'll do those tomorrow. Blackout resolved!

Boss: (apparently doesn't even noticed I fixed his shitty service)

-- Next day --
Boss: I want you to work on [stupid shit] instead.
Me: But what about the followup fixes?
Boss: Top priority! because customer service!
Me: ... fine.

-- Next week (verbatim because wtf) --
Boss: Did we test that [resolution] on ______? No one thought to test this. It didnt cross anyones mind at all? Either you guys can make good decisions and document concerns or I have to be part of every decision [...]. But this is basic. SHould have been a team heads up and said if we are switching this what can it break and can we test it. [sic]

Me: Did you want me to resolve the blackout quickly and allow people to actually use our service, or spend two days checking everything that might possibly have gone wrong? I weighed the possibilities and picked the solution with the quickest implementation with the fewest consequences. You're welcome.

Me: (Quotes boss's "SHould have been a team heads up" and links my "this is what could go wrong" heads-up in Slack)
Boss: (pretends not to even notice)
Boss: (talks about customer service related crap)

What a fucking loser.
I'm so angry he didn't respond and start in on me over it. I wanted to tear him to shreds in front of everyone.

Related:
He tried adding another huge project to my plate earlier today, and I started flipping out on him for all these shitty sales features he keeps dumping on me in place of real work that i still get blamed for not finishing. The contractor stepped in before it got too heated, though, which is probably best because my reaction was pretty unprovoked. The above rant, though? Asshole doesn't read, just blames and yells when he's angry.

I really hate him.

Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:

Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.

-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.

What did I do wrong ?

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

The Top 20 replies by programmers when their programs do not work:

20. "That's weird..."
19. "It's never done that before."
18. "It worked yesterday."
17. "How is that possible?"
16. "It must be a hardware problem."
15. "What did you type in wrong to get it to crash?"
14. "There is something funky in your data."
13. "I haven't touched that module in weeks!"
12. "You must have the wrong version."
11. "It's just some unlucky coincidence."
10. "I can't test everything!"
9. "THIS can't be the source of THAT."
8. "It works, but it hasn't been tested."
7. "Somebody must have changed my code."
6. "Did you check for a virus on your system?"
5. "Even though it doesn't work, how does it feel?
4. "You can't use that version on your system."
3. "Why do you want to do it that way?"
2. "Where were you when the program blew up?"

And the Number One reply by programmers when their programs don't work:

1. "It works on my machine."

Hello! Is this Gordon’s Pizza?

No sir, it’s Google’s Pizza.

Did I dial the wrong number?

No sir, Google bought the pizza store.

Oh, alright - then I’d like to place an order please.

Okay sir, do you want the usual?

The usual? You know what my usual is?

According to the caller ID, the last 15 times you’ve ordered a 12-slice with double-cheese, sausage, and thick crust.

Okay - that’s what I want this time too.

May I suggest that this time you order an 8-slice with ricotta, arugula, and tomato instead?

No, I hate vegetables.

But your cholesterol is not good.

How do you know?

Through the subscribers guide. We have the results of your blood tests for the last 7 years.

Maybe so, but I don’t want the pizza you suggest – I already take medicine for high cholesterol.

But you haven’t taken the medicine regularly. 4 months ago you purchased from Drugsale Network a box of only 30 tablets.

I bought more from another drugstore.

It’s not showing on your credit card sir.

I paid in cash.

But according to your bank statement you did not withdraw that much cash.

I have another source of cash.

This is not showing on your last tax form, unless you got it from an undeclared income source.

WHAT THE HELL? ENOUGH! I’m sick of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp. I’m going to an island without internet, where there’s no cellphone line, and no one to spy on me …

I understand sir, but you’ll need to renew your passport … it expired 5 weeks ago.

Years ago I was an application developer at a medium sized corporation and was also responsible for support for an HR department. This occurred early one morning shortly after I arrived at work.

User: My app doesn't work.
Me: What's wrong with it?
User: I just get a blank screen.
Me: A blank screen? What happens when you hit a key?
User: Nothing.
Me: Do any apps work?
User: No, I just get a blank screen.
Me: Is your monitor on?
User: Yes, I turned it on.

This type of witty banter went on for several minutes when the answer suddenly hit me.

Me: Is your computer turned on?
User: Do I need to turn it on?
Me: Did you turn it off before you went home last night?
User: Yes.
Me: And do you normally turn it on in the morning when you come in?
User: Yes.
Me: Then why didn't you turn it on this morning when you came in?
User: I didn't know I needed to.

It was at this point I heard the programmer over the cubicle wall from me burst out laughing. He had been listening to the conversation and couldn't take it anymore.

The really sad part is that this was not an isolated incident. This kind of stuff occurred on a semi-regular basis with this individual's department.

Css is most definitely a woman who's mad at you but won't tell you why.

"What's wrong? what did I do? "

"Nothing..."

I have to let it out. It's been brewing for years now.

Why does MySQL still exist?

Really, WHY?!
It was lousy as hell 8 years ago, and since then it hasn't changed one bit. Why do people use it?

First off, it doesn't conform to standards, allowing you to aggregate without explicitly grouping, in which case you get god knows what type of shit in there, and then everybody asks why the numbers are so weird.

Second... it's $(CURRENT_YEAR) for fucks sake! This is the time of large data sets and complex requirements from those data sets. Just an hour through SO will show you dozens of poor people trying to do with MySQL what MySQL just can't do because it's stupid.

Recursion? 4 lines in any other large RDBMS, and tough luck in MySQL. So what next? Are you supposed to use Lemograph alongside MySQL just because you don't know that PostgreSQL is free and super fast?

Window functions to mix rows and do neat stuff? Naaah, who the hell needs that, right? Who needs to find the products ordered by the customer with the biggest order anyway? Oh you need that actually? Well you should write 3-4 queries, nest them in an incredibly fucked up way, summon a demon and feed it the first menstrual blood of your virgin daughter.

There used to be some excuses in the past "but but but, shared hosting only has MySQL". Which was wrong by the way. This was true only for big hosting names, and for people who didn't bother searching for alternatives. And now it's even better, since VPS and PaaS solutions are now available at prices lower than shared hosting, which give you better speed, performance and stability than shared hosting ever did.

"But but but Wordpress uses MySQL" - well then kill it! There are other platforms out there, that aren't just outrageously horrible on the inside and outside. Wordpress is crap, and work on it pays crap. Learn Laravel, Symfony, Zend, or even Drupal. You'll be able to create much more value than those shitty Wordpress sites that nobody ever visits or pay money on.

"But but but my client wants some static pages presented beside their online shop" - so why use Wordpress then? Static pages are static pages. Whip up a basic MVC set-up in literally any framework out there, avoid MySQL, include a basic ACL package for that framework, create a controller where you add a CKEditor to edit page content, and stick a nice template from themeforest for that page and be done with that shit! Save the mock-up for later use if you do that stuff often. Or if you're lazy to even do that, then take up Drupal.

But sure, this is going a bit over the scope. I actually don't care where you insert content for your few pages. It can be a JSON file for all I care. But if I catch you doing an e-commerce solution, or anything else than just text storage, on MySQL, I'll literally start re-assessing your ability to think rationally.

We're using a ticket system at work that a local company wrote specifically for IT-support companies. It's missing so many (to us) essential features that they flat out ignored the feature requests for. I started dissecting their front-end code to find ways to get the site to do what we want and find a lot of ugly code.
Stuff like if(!confirm("blablabla") == false) and whole JavaScript libraries just to perform one task in one page that are loaded on every page you visit, complaining in the js console that they are loaded in the wrong order. It also uses a websocket on a completely arbitrary port making it impossible to work with it if you are on a restricted wifi. They flat out lie about their customers not wanting an offline app even though their communications platform on which they got asked this question once again got swarmed with big customers disagreeing as the mobile perofrmance and design of the mobile webpage is just atrocious.

So i dig farther and farthee adding all the features we want into a userscript with a beat little 'custom namespace' i make pretty good progress until i find a site that does asynchronous loading of its subpages all of a sudden. They never do that anywhere else. Injecting code into the overcomolicated jQuery mess that they call code is impossible to me, so i track changes via a mutationObserver (awesome stuff for userscripts, never heard of it before) and get that running too.

The userscript got such a volume of functions in such a short time that my boss even used it to demonstrate to them what we want and asked them why they couldn't do it in a reasonable timeframe.

All in all I'm pretty proud if the script, but i hate that software companies that write such a mess of code in different coding styles all over the place even get a foot into the door.

And that's just the code part: They very veeeery often just break stuff in updates that then require multiple hotfixes throughout the day after we complain about it. These errors even go so far to break functionality completely or just throw 500s in our face. It really gives you the impression that they are not testing that thing at all.

And the worst: They actively encourage their trainees to write as much code as possible to get paid more than their contract says, so of course they just break stuff all the time to write as much as possible.
Where did i get that information you ask? They state it on ther fucking career page!

We also have reverse proxy in front of that page that manages the HTTPS encryption and Let's Encrypt renewal. Guess what: They internally check if the certificate on the machine is valid and the system refuses to work if it isn't. How do you upload a certificate to the system you asked? You don't! You have to mail it to them for them to SSH into the system and install it manually. When will that be possible you ask? SOON™.
At least after a while i got them to just disable the 'feature'.

While we are at 'features' (sorry for the bad structure): They have this genius 'smart redirect' feature that is supposed to throw you right back where you were once you're done editing something. Brilliant idea, how do they do it? Using a callback libk like everyone else? Noooo. A serverside database entry that only gets correctly updated half of the time. So while multitasking in multiple tabs because the performance of that thing almost forces you to makes it a whole lot worse you are not protected from it if you don't. Example: you did work on ticket A and save that. You get redirected to ticket B you worked on this morning even though its fucking 5 o' clock in the evening. So of course you get confused over wherever you selected the right ticket to begin with. So you have to check that almost everytime.

Alright, rant over.
Let's see if i beed to make another one after their big 'all feature requests on hold, UI redesign, everything will be fixed and much better'-update.

So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.

Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.

He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.

What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!

Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'

He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.

Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.

So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.

So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!

Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.

Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.

You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.

Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.

Okay i'm done - YOU FUCKING ANDROID STUDIO MORONS. Being at a high level in C++, I tried to do some android coding. THERE ARE FUCKING NO GOOD TUTORIALS, NO GOOD DOCS, HECK, THE SELF GENERATED CODE OF THE IDE IS WRONG: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON YOU FUCKING MORONS?
oh wait, let me first import android.widgets.rant;
or was it android.widgets.devrant.rant; or was it android.dr.rant.RantManager;?

Oh wait, I know lets search the docs?
OH WAIT THE DOCUMENTATION DOESNT HAVE THAT.
NOW HOW ABOUT I JUST TRY THE EXAMPLE CODE? WELL UH-UH! YOU HAVE TO FIND OUT YOURSELF WHAT TO IMPORT IN ORDER FOR IT TO WORK. ALSO, WHAT FUCKING UP WITH THAT PERMISSION SYSTEM? ITS SO BADLY DOCUMENTED!!!

Oh wait, I'm sure that I have to change something in this file... or was it that other file?

GOD
how dare they have style and design guidelines?
MORONS!

I will resort to implement my app idea in godot, idc anymore... I don't want to burn out because I used the "official high standard" tech.

it definitely isn't high standard and definitely not good. Thank you morons@google

THANK YOU FOR NOTHING

A FRAMEWORK WHERE I NEED 2 DAYS TO FIGURE OUT TO ADD EVENT LISTENERS TO MY THINGS IS DEFINITELY NOT ONE I'D LIKE TO USE.

also, whats up with

AudioRecord (int audioSource, int samplerateInHz, int channelConfig, int audioFormat, int bufferSizeInBytes);

ARE WE BACK IN THE C ERA? CAN'T YOU BE BOTHERED TO IMPLEMENT SOME SIMPLE FUCKING ENUMS????

WHATS THE POINT OF AN OOP LANGUAGE IF YOU ARE GOING TO USE IT LIKE C?

Oh wait I found a tutorial ... First trigger: "java scripts". Second trigger: this guy LITTERALLY ONLY TEACHES YOU HOW TO PLACE WIDGETS ON THE CANVAS. THANKS FOR NOTHING SHERLOCK!

Oh btw: did you know that android studio gives the best error messages?
"Error: illegal start of expression"
NO ERROR MESSAGE - NOTHING!
YOU BETTER USE THE IDE OR YOU GO HOME YOU FUCKER!!!

Oh and btw: if you want to read the best documentation - the code itself YOU GOTTA AGREE TO OR TERMS OF SERVICE!!!! WE DONT WANT ANYBODY TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL WITHOUT US KNOWING!!!!!

THANK YOU GOOGLE FOR NOTHING!
YOU FUCKERS!

thanks godot for *atleast* existing. You are the... last pick i'd pick, but :shrug:, I have experienced android studio now.

If anybody has any advice on what to use instead, please go ahead. And you better not tell me how good you are at android studio. I DONT CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU CAN IMPLEMENT IN ANDROID STUDIO. I JUST WANT SOMETHING THAT IS USABLE WITHOUT HAVING TO BE EXTRA CAREFUL WHEN DOING *ANYTHING*!!!!

fuckers.

Sister = bee ( who isn't a stranger to Ubuntu)
Me = Cee

Bee: can I use your laptop?
Cee : why ? Use yours ,it's works fine.
Bee : no I want to use yours and I need to work with windows.
Cee: 🤯
Bee : my work can only be done using windows.
Cee : fine do whatever ( doesn't want to argue )
* Le bee opens MS word, and starts her work *
Cee : 😤😤Seriously?
Bee : I don't like libre
Cee : 😑😑😑^∞
* Few moments later *
Bee : my work is done ,you can have your laptop,btw it's updating.
Cee : 😑😑😑😑😑
* 2000 years later *
*Opens Ubuntu *
*Getting a weird bug*
*Tried to fix *
*Can't open OS files * 👏👏👏🎆
* Windows not shutdown properly *
* Opens windows *
* Not able to login via pin *
* Password ? not accepted *
* Changes outlook password *
* Please chose a password you haven't chosen before *
* Logs in *
* types old pin to change pin *
*You've entered wrong pin too many times *
*System hanging a lot *
* Removes pin *
* Gets huge mcAfee restart system popups , every 10 sec *
* Just shutdown , feels irritated for the rest of the day*

* Regrets dual booting, shd have wiped the windows partition 😫😫*

*Wonders,what the hell did my sister even do to my laptop ?*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Without even talking to me, why the fuck did you announce that I would be taking the project manager role. Who the fuck wants to do that monkey job? What the fuck is fucking hell wrong with your fucken brain.

You bloody piece of shit with masters from university and can’t handle fucken projects and client’s. Clients are complaining to me about you. Whole day looks for women to fuck during the night while we are dying virgin over here. Fuck you and I wish your dick falls apart.

What the fuck, I just discovered that my father knows vi.

He's not a programmer.

Why, God, why I'm only able to use nano... What did I do wrong...

So I've been looking for a Linux sysadmin job for a while now. I get a lot of rejections daily and I don't mind that because they can give me feedback as for what I am doing wrong. But do you know what really FUCKING grinds my FUCKING gears?

BEING REJECTED BASED ON LEVEL OF EDUCATION/NOT HAVING CERTIFICATIONS FOR CERTAIN STUFF. Yes, I get that you can't blindly hire anyone and that you have to filter people out but at least LOOK AT THEIR FUCKING SKILLSET.

I did MBO level (the highest sub level though) as study which is considered to be the lowest education level in my country. lowest education level meaning that it's mostly focused on learning through doing things rather than just learning theory.

Why the actual FUCK is that, for some fucking reason, supposed to be a 'lower level' than HBO or Uni? (low to high in my country: MBO, HBO, Uni). Just because I learn better by doing shit instead of solely focusing on the theory and not doing much else does NOT FUCKING MEAN THAT I AM DUMBER OR LESS EDUCATED ON A SUBJECT.

So in the last couple of months, I've literally had rejections with reasons like
- 'Sorry but we require HBO level as people with this level can analyze stuff better in general which is required for this job.'. - Well then go fuck yourself. Just because I have a lower level of education doesn't FUCKING mean that I can't analyze shit at a 'lower level' than people who've done HBO.

- 'You don't seem to have a certificate for linux server management so it's a no go, sorry!' - Kindly go FUCK yourself. Give me a couple of barebones Debian servers and let me install a whole setup including load balancers, proxies if fucking neccesary, firewalls, web servers, FUCKING Samba servers, YOU FUCKING NAME IT. YES, I CAN DO THAT BUT SOLELY BECAUSE I DON'T HAVE THAT FUCKING CERTIFICATE APPEARANTLY MEANS THAT I AM TOO INCOMPETENT TO DO THAT?! Yes. I get that you have to filter shit but GUESS WHAT. IT'S RIGHT THERE IN MY FUCKING RESUME.

- 'Sorry but due to this role being related to cyber security, we can't hire anyone lower than HBO.' - OH SO YOUR LEVEL OF EDUCATION DEFINES HOW GOOD YOU ARE/CAN BE AT CYBER SECURITY RELATED STUFF? ARE YOU MOTHERFUCKING RETARDED? I HAVE BEEN DOING SHIT RELATED TO CYBER SECURITY SINCE I WAS 14-15 FUCKiNG YEARS OLD. I AM FAMILIAR WITH LOADS OF TOOLS/HACKING TECHNIQUES/PENTESTING/DEFENSIVE/OFFENSIVE SECURITY AND SO ON AND YOU ARE TELLING ME THAT I NEED A HIGHER LEVEL OF FUCKING EDUCATION?!?!? GO FUCKING FUCK YOURSELF.

And I can go on like this for a while. I wish some companies I come across would actually look at skills instead of (only) study levels and certifications. Those other companies can go FUCK THEMSELVES.

The amount of people who don't know the difference between kilobyte and kibibyte is too damn high. So much confusion.

TL;DR : Most people use Kilobyte ( KB ) and Kibibyte ( KiB ) wrong and i am angry about it.

When i first got involved with software as a teenager, i always wondered why we convert kilo to mega with multiplying by 1024, when we do it with multiplying by 1000 basically everywhere else. Our physics teacher called this SI unit system and told us that this is an internationally accepted statement. So why is there a different rule ? Did i miss out something ? Regrettably I didn't ask her about this.

I just didn't get fully as a teenager. Now, as I am a developer now, i understand that dealing with power or ten is troublesome. Due to ease of work, we lazily mess with SI system and use it wrongly. Isn't it the time we end this abomination ?

2 years ago i talked to a friend about this, he said that i shouldn't bother.
I talked to a teacher, he said "you are right but using different brand of unit system can be overkill, since there is not much difference anyways." I said okay and left.

1 mega = 1000 kilo
1 giga = 1000 mega etc

also,

MB = Megabyte ( 1000 Kilobyte )
KB = Kilobyte ( 1000 Byte )
MiB = Mebibyte ( 1024 Kibibyte )
KiB = Kibibyte ( 1024 Byte )

I am writing this because today i saw someone do it wrong on the internet, all of these came into mind. I wonder your approach about this, for research purposes.

Call me dick all you want, but i am the guy who always corrects uncertainty, no matter what. Things should be in place, correctly. No i don't have OCD. If you say something like "I have 1 MB of executable file, which means i have 1024 KB of it", i will find you, and i will correct you.

Root: Fleshes out missing data in some factories. Tests affected code and finds the change breaks some specs (but shouldn’t).

Root: Reaches out to spec author.

Root: Messages thundercunt (the ticket’s code reviewer) on slack about the specs and the reaching out. No response.

Root: Works on another ticket while blocked.

Root: Logs off.

Root: Talks with spec author chick in the morning. Decide to pair on specs later.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Gives update in standup. Mentions factories and broken specs. Mentions pairing with spec chick.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Pulled off tickets in favor of prod issue. Gets ignored by everyone else diagnosing prod issue. Investigates prod issue by herself. Discovers prod issue isn’t from bad code, but bad requirements — code works as requested. Communicates this with details. Gets ignored by people still diagnosing prod issue. Tries again. Gets ignored. Gives up. Works on non-blocked tickets instead.

TC: Still no slack response.

Hours later:

TC: Comments on PR telling me I broke specs (how did I not notice?), that I need to reach out to spec chick and work with her, and that I can’t resolve the ticket until it’s fixed and passes code review.

TC: Still no slack response. (21 hours later at this point)

TC: Logs off. Still no response (25 hours at this point)

———

Ignoring the prod issue for the moment…

I broke specs. No shit.
I need to talk with spec chick. No shit.
I can’t resolve the ticket. No shit!

Bitch, I told you all of this 21 fucking hours prior, and again 3 hours prior during standup. But no, I clearly “don’t communicate” and obviously have no bloody clue what I’m doing, either, so I need everything spelled out for me.

And no, I didn’t resolve the fucking ticket. Why the fuck would I if it still has pending changes? Do you even check? Ugh!

And what the fuck with that prod issue? I’m literally giving you the answer. fucking listen! Stupid cunts.

Why is it all of the women I work with are useless or freaking awful people? Don’t get me wrong, many of the men are, too, but I swear it’s every single one of the women. (Am I awful, too?)

Just. Ugh.
I can’t wait to leave this sewer of a company.

Oddly still a good day, though. Probably because I talked to recruiters and sent out my resume again.

I have never been fucked more in my life. A month ago I finished a 3 month internship for my last year of my education. And next to the internship I only have my thesis to defend and voila, I got my diploma! The internship itself went awesome, met some very interesting people, had a ton of fun working there and they were really happy about me.

But then it started, about 2 weeks after my internship started I got an email that my mentor (from school itself) had changed. It changed to a guy who's known for his insane way of teaching and being very unprofessional. Sometimes when I had a class on another level a bit further in the hall, we could hear him screaming while he was "teaching". He's really insane and should in no way be teaching to students. On top of that he has very little knowledge about CS, since he "teaches" maths.

So after I got the news I knew I was fucked. This guy is really hard to communicate with. And I'd never be able to have a decent, professional conversation with him.

So after I did everything I knew I was supposed to do, I tried to contact him on what else he'd need from me. His emails were crazy, unprofessional, and in no condition of being able to read and understand. So I started to get really annoyed but I didn't make this clear towards him. I even complained to another person of my school in a very polite way by saying that our communication wasn't going so well, I got no answer from that person and she even forwarded my complaint to him without asking for my permission and answering me.

So I kept doing what he kinda asked for, but had no idea if I was doing it wrong or right since I almost never got an answer from him, or the answer was not even an answer to my questions in the first place.

Today I had my presentation of the internship in front of him. It's the first time I see him since this school year. I give my presentation being quite happy of what I did at the company. When I was finished he starts bashing me into oblivion with ignorant questions, comments and very deconstructive negative feedback. Me not knowing what the fuck is happening and getting really angry inside standing there with nothing to say. I answered all of his questions as good as I could. But he was tearing me down so fucking hard. Because I only had half an hour I sticked with the most important stuff about my internship, didn't go to deep into all of it because he's not a fucking it'er anyway, and he asked for it specifically not to go deep into the project. But now he's saying I'm not giving enough information?! (He wanted to know what IDE I used?!?! What the fuck has that to do with anything)

So although I had a wonderful internship and I completed my project far better than the company had expected, my presentation went awful. I'm thinking that the guy was predetermined in failing me. How can I do a good job if he himself is not give a fuck about me. So now he's probably failing me for something he has no clue of what I did, and it's not even my fault.

I have no idea what I should be doing now. I start working in the second week of February but I probably won't get my bachelors degree until September now because of this fucker. I'm even thinking on taking legal actions. This guy just fucked my self confidence so hard. I'm fucking depressed right now

Guys, my unfortunately daily rant of my pm

I was told to create a docker env for our team. Good. Document the process so everyone can know what to do. Good.

My PM follows what he wants to instead of step by step and changes whatever he wants to.

I am asked for help because he doesnt know. No prob.

Me: "Do this, do this and.."
PM: "that doesnt matter, trust me, I could change it and.."
Me: "...and it wont work"
PM: "I know suff too, check" *does his changes aaaaaand doesnt work*
* awkward staring*

That happened a while ago.
This week, he crashed his git repo because he was doing things in docker team (including him) decided not to.

Took me more enough time explaining him "you are not supposed to do that in the container" funny fact he wanted to prove that his way was right and even if he did my way it would crash.

Sooooo he did my way just to prove how wrong I was. Everything worked flawlessly. Rage-still-awkward staring.

Plus the "aww that's weird. I dont know how this happened"

Dev: “Ughh..look at this –bleep- code! When I execute the service call, it returns null, but the service received a database error.”
Me: “Yea, that service was written during a time when the mentality was ‘Why return a service error if the client can’t do anything about it?’”
Dev: “I would say that’s a misunderstanding of that philosophy.”
Me: “I would say it’s a perfectly executed example of a deeply flawed philosophy.”
Dev: “No, the service should just return something that tells the client the operation failed.”
Me: “They did. It was supposed to return a valid result, and the developer indicated a null response means the operation failed. How you deal with the null response is up to you.”
Dev: “That is stupid. How am I supposed to know a null response means the operation failed?”
Me: “OK, how did you know the operation failed?”
Dev: “I had to look at the service error logs.”
Me: “Bingo.”
Dev: “This whole service is just a –bleep-ing mess. There are so many things that can go wrong and the only thing the service returns is null when the service raises an exception.”
Me: “OK, what should the service return?”
Dev: ”I don’t know. Error 500 would be nice.”
Me: “Would you know what to do with error 500?”
Dev: ”Yea, I would look at the error log”
Me: “Just like you did when the service returned null?”
<couple of seconds of silence>
Dev: “I don’t know, it’s a –bleep-ing mess.”
Me: “You’re in the code, change it.”
Dev: “Ooohhh no, not me. The whole thing will have to be re-written. It should have been done correctly the first time. If we had time to do code reviews, I would have caught this –bleep- before the service was deployed.”
Me: “Um, you did.”
<a shocked look from Dev>
Dev: “What…no, I’ve never seen this code.”
Me: “I sat next to Chuck when you were telling him he needed to change the service to return null if an exception was raised. I remember you telling him specifically to pop-up an error dialog ‘Service request failed’ to the user when the service returned null.”
Dev: “I don’t remember any of that.”
Me: “Well, Chuck did. He even put it in the check-in comments. See…”
<check in comments stated Dev’s code review and dictated the service return null on exceptions>
Dev: “Hmm…I guess I did. –bleep- are you a –bleep-ing elephant? You –bleep-ing remember everything.”

<what I wanted to say>
No, I don’t remember everything, but I remember all the drive-by <bleep>-ed up coding philosophies you tried to push to the interns and we’re now having all kinds of problems I spend waaaaay too much time fixing.
<what I said, and lied a little bit>
Me: “No, I was helping Nancy last week troubleshoot the client application last week with the pop-up error. Since the service returned a null, she didn’t know where to begin to look for the actual error.”
Dev: “Oh.”

So this chick has been super nice to me for the past few months, and has been trying to push me towards a role in security. She said nothing but wonderful things about it. It’s easy, it’s not much work, it’s relaxing, etc.

I eventually decided I’m burned out enough that something, anything different would be good, and went for it. I’m now officially doing both dev and security. The day I started, she announced that she was leaving the security team and wouldn’t join any other calls. Just flat-out left.

She trained me on doing a security review of this release, which basically amounted to a zoom call where I did all of the work and she directed me on what to do next, ignored everything I said, and treated me like an idiot. It’s apparently an easy release. The work itself? Not difficult, but it’s very involved, very time consuming, and requires a lot of paper trail — copying the same crap to three different places, tagging lots of people, copying their responses and pasting them elsewhere, filing tickets, linking tickets, copying info back and forth to slack, signing off on things, tagging tickets in a specific way, writing up security notes in a very specific format etc. etc. etc. It’s apparently usually very hectic with lots of last-minute changes, devs who simply ignore security requests, etc.

I asked her at the end for a quick writeup because I’m not going to remember everything and we didn’t cover everything that might happen.

Her response: Just remember what you did here, and do it again!

I asked again for her to write up some notes. She said “I would recommend.. you watch the new release’s channel starting Thursday, and then review what we did here, and just do all that again. Oh, and if you have any questions, talk to <security boss> so you get in the habit of asking him instead of me. Okay, bye!”

Fucking what.
No handoff doc?
Not willing to answer questions after a day and a half of training?

A recap
• She was friendly.
• She pushed me towards security.
• She said the security role was easy and laid-back.
• I eventually accepted.
• She quit the same day.
• The “easy release” took a day and a half of work with her watching, and it has a two-day deadline.
• She treated (and still treats) me like a burden and ignores everything I said or asked.
• The work is anything but laid-back.
• She refuses to spend any extra time on this or write up any notes.
• She refuses to answer any further questions because (quote) “I should get in the habit of asking <security boss> instead of her”

So she smiled, lied, and stabbed me in the back. Now she’s treating me like an annoyance she just wants to go away.

I get that she’s burned out from this, but still, what a fucking bitch. I almost can’t believe she’s acting this way, but I’ve grown to expect it from everyone.

But hey, at least I’m doing something different now, which is what I wanted. The speed at which she showed her true colors, though, holy shit.

“I’m more of a personal motivator than anything,” she says, “and I’m first and foremost a supporter of women developers!” Exactly wrong, every single word of it.

God I hate people like this.

Spent 4 hours today working on a monitor that wasn't working. someone had put by their garbage can in the rain. I dried it out for about 2 weeks before plugging it in. It turned on but when I plugged in the DVI, it did nothing.

Today, I pulled the ENTIRE thing apart because either I could find out what was wrong, or all is lost anyways. Who knows what the rain could do to it?

With no luck, I did a quick search online about the model and found that this one just had some defective firmware (Who knew monitors had filmware??) I installed it, ran it, it took about 20 seconds and it worked!

Lesson learned once again: google is your friend

Stupid bloody PM.

I asked him for two images a long time ago: a 1x and a 2x ‘0’ monogram for Apple wallets, since we currently have monograms for glyphs 1-9 and a-z. And this is in production, so any merchant whose name starts with a ‘0’ will cause a crash. We’ve been fortunate thus far.

But this PM. He lied about who needed to make the images for three weeks, saying it’s up to the designer, when he actually made them himself. He also said he was going to take care of handing the task off, and never did, and then said designer when on FTO. When I asked the designer about it after he came back, he had no clue what graphics (and even the feature) I was talking about, or even what the requirements for the graphics might be. I had to confront the PM before he admitted he made the originals, and (begrudgingly) said he would make the new ones.

When said PM did finally make the images, the colors were all wrong. They’re not the light teal from our branding, they’re dark blue and the font is different, making them pretty ugly.

Also, after assuring me that the naming convention for the new images is the same, I discover that they’re neither organized into folders nor even named properly. (And yes, he is aware of how it should be.) I can rename and move them around easily enough, but come on, don’t say you did the work and then give me a mess to clean up!

And to top it all off, he completely spaced making the ‘u’ monograms, so I’m still short a fucking glyph!

Asdfjskldf.

How do you do every single thing wrong? Like, how!?

I interviewed a guy with quite a few years of experience, university studies from a first world country, very long CV with stuff that he did, most of it relevant to the job, and 5-6 certifications, 2 of which relevant to the job, which would qualify him as an expert (as he himself declared in the CV), of a higher qualification than mine, but less experience.

Welp, if we're gonna hire someone with a higher salary, from whom I am to learn, I better come up with an interesting, but simple to understand problem, relevant to the position, that I would solve in 30 minutes, and give him 2h (surprise factor, unpreparedness, nervousness should be considered).

40 minutes in and I understand that there is lots of doing, lots of code, but the guy has no idea what he's doing.
I simplify the problem, remove the complicated bit. Turning it into a "business case description" of an entry level problem.
...
Same shit. In 20 minutes, zero progress. At this point the solution should be exactly 4 short lines of code. He gives me 50 that produce a completely wrong result, and he has no idea why.

I simplify further. I explicitly express the problem as the entry-level problem that it is - to count the number of interactions on the website in a specific day. That's it.
10 minutes more pass. I don't know why I'm wasting my time. Maybe I just want to be polite. Maybe I want to eliminate all doubt that it's not something else.
Nope.
He couldn't even react to my explanation of why he got the wrong result, and that all he had to do is move some stuff around.

Certifications, experts, universities.

What the fuck people? Can't we be simpler, and instead be knowledgeable? The time it took him to write that list of certifications, he could've learned how to solve this problem from any introductory course.

This rant means YOU if you are one of those people that "fix" their family's computers.

I was visiting my family over the holidays and while I managed to stay away from fixing their computers for the most time, I offered to help my grandfather to update the Garmin navigation device he wanted to gift my father. (They do not use smartphones for navigation, and my father doesn't want "these modern shitty phones".)

When booting up my grandfather's laptop, I realized something odd: Linux Mint boot screen. Wut?

And immediately I said: "It could be impossible to update your navigation device on this laptop."

As true enough, the Garmin Express update software requires either a Windows PC or a Mac; and even though I vaguely hoped it might be possible to upgrade through Linux, I just could not be bothered to find out that day.

What I wondered though is why did my grandfather of all people ran Linux!?

Don't get me wrong, I use Linux myself on my work machine and I never want to work with something else when coding; yet my grandfather is an end user of the show-me-where-and-what-and-how-often-to-click-kind.

What could he gain by it?

As it turns out, the computer nerd's friend of my uncle managed his PC. And my uncle and he decided unanimously my grandfather should better run Linux. Is it something my grandfather needs? No. BUT IT'S RIGHT! Suck it up! (My father's laptop therefore also runs Linux Mint. So he can't upgrade his new device either.)

This is the ugly kind of entitled nerd-dom I truly detest.

When discussing things further, my grandfather told me that he had problems ever since with his printer. Under Windows, he knew how to print on the special photo paper. Under Linux, all he can barely manage is to print on normal papers. Shame, printing photos was the only thing he liked doing on that device. What did my uncle's friend tell him?

"Get a decent printer!"

Fuck that guy.

It's fine if Linux works for you, but before you install it on a PC of a relative, you better make sure it fits their needs! If you have that odd member that only wants to write letters, read emails, use facebook, and wants to play that browser game, feel free to introduce them to Linux.

Yet if they have any special wish, don't stand in their way.

If they want to do something that requires a certain OS, don't just decide for them that their desire is wrong, but help them achieve their goal. If you can't align that with your ideology, then get the fuck out of my way and stop "helping".

For some people, a computer is a device to achieve a certain goal, a work. They only get hindered by your ill-advised attempts at virtue signalling.

Apparently, part of being a software engineer means knowing how to read minds and do other people's jobs.

While implementing a user story for marketing, we found some associated features that, according to the database, have not been used for years. We tell them this. We do the courtesy of asking, "Hey, is there anything on the site that is utilizing these features? We'd like to clean up the DB."

"We don't know."

Engineering suggests, "Ok, lets turn the feature off, then, and see if anyone complains. It's been years according to the DB."

Marketing gets angry and hostile and says, "That's not the way to do things!"

I don't vocalize, "Well, not knowing how to do your own damned job is not the way to do things."
-
Marketing asks us to integrate a third party feature to the site. We ask, "Ok, what page do you want it on, and what information do you want to collect, and what should it look like?"

"I don't know. You're engineering. You tell us."

We implement it as best we can.

Marketing says, "HEY! This isn't done right! It's missing this and this and this!"

"Did you ask us to implement that? According to the user story, it passes acceptance criteria."

Marketing says, "I thought you would just know that! I didn't know it was a separate thing. Just put it on all the pages, then. You guys really should know the site better."

Engineering gets angry and hostile
-
Marketing says, "We need this removed from the site."

Engineering replies, "We have a GUI for that. Just go to this URL and you can do it yourself."

Marketing replies, "Well, if that's a really complicated thing, can you just run a script against the DB?"

Engineering says, "If we've built a UI for you, we really shouldn't be executing SQL scripts directly against the DB."

Marketing gets angry and hostile.
-
Engineering tries asking nicely.

"Marketing, if you want us to add new stuff to the site, or change stuff, please tell us what it is and where it should go and what the customer experience should be like."

Marketing replies, "We don't know the site that well. We are leaning on you to tell us."

I do not vocalize, all while trying to keep my eyes from bulging out of my head, my face red with rage, "YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF SELLING SHIT ON A WEBSITE THAT YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT. YOU ARE ASKING FOR CHANGES TO SOMETHING YOU DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?"

Engineering is angry and hostile.

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 ;)

Matched with a girl on Tinder who studies Artificial Intelligence.

Me: "I see you study AI, how cool! Is it hard?"

She hasn't texted back for 3 days

What did I do wrong?

My friend loves Dreamweaver... And continuously says that he doesn't understand what people see in it that is so wrong... It does the job right?...... Fucking blind...

Uses a bootstrap plugin which generates HTML code for bootstrap.
I did not know this at the time.

Comes to me the night before submission.
He: Dude i need help quick! I've got the presentation tomorrow morning and bootstrap fucked up the links to my style sheets or something, my page is broken and won't work. I should have done what you did and gone for Foundation...
Me: Yeah, because the bootstrap framework definitely affects the style links...
He: help me out man, please! I can't do this anymore!

I had my submission the day after him to prepare still...

Me: Teamviewer. Now.

Log on to Teamviewer.
See what he's using to code...
Dreamweaver..... Niiiiice....

I go through the code. There are empty divs with &nbsc; in them everywhere.. some HTML elements haven't been closed, no comments, indentation seems to be completely random. All the usual shit storm of a novice web designer.
The only thing is, this guy I know knows how to indent, I've seen his previous work. Why is this so horrible then???
I ask what the hell happened, it looked like a nuclear explosion happened!

He: Yeah I'm using this great plugin for Dreamweaver which lets me click and it puts in Bootstrap elements! It's great!

........ You're blaming the bootstrap framework for affecting your links to your stylesheets, you're using an elements generator, you're not checking what the FUCK it puts into your code, not fixing the indenting, not checking the standard HTML rules are followed AND YOU WONDER WHY IT'S BROKEN???

Kill me now.

I once woke up to a $65k invoice from AWS and almost puked in my pants.

2 years ago I was cycling through freelancers on upwork to find a decent candidate. I guess i hired the wrong guy because even after revoking access, they got into my AWS account and spun up 1000's of ec2 instances in multiple locations.

I was a newly wed and feared for my life. How do I tell my wife I gota pay $65k with barely any savings.

I contacted AWS. And they started off by saying "we see some suspicious activity on your account, don't worry, we will handle it". I was like "yehhh cuz I've been paying pennies for the last couple of years. No way I can rake up a bill like that."

Since I was going through so many devs, it was impossible to figure out who. But even if I did find out, what am I gona do. I'm just a code monkey.

Hey. This code look broken. What should I do?

It isn't broken. It's doing what it's supposed to.

Well, it's hard to follow, but it certainly doesn't look right. And it isn't doing what I expect. Also, why is it calling method(a_class1_or_class2) with a class3?

It isn't hard to follow, and it works just fine. Let me show you. ... huh. looks like it isn't right. and there's a comment here saying the calls aren't clear. but it works just fine. Just copy it over and do it the same way.

I already did that. and it isn't working.

What are you talking about? Of course it works fine. Did you check your code?

------

Really, dude? It doesn't work fine. but, guess what? It works fine* when I change it to call that method with a class2 like it asks for. (Surprise!) But I can't tell him that. Nope. Bossmang get offended. Still won't admit I was right about anything, either.

Ahh... the continual joy of working with (and for) trash.

* well, more fine; the rest of the feature is still wrong. but nope, i'm not allowed to fix it. because why would they want anything to work properly? Already-accepted wrong behavior is good enough. Can't clean up the code, either, because that "muddies the waters." Bitch, I couldn't see the bottom of this sewer if it was half an inch deep! Which is more important: the last contributor entry beside the code, or that code being readable and maintainable? or it, you know, working?

doot doot.
need to scoot.

In my current work, I have two systems to work on (let's name em Systems A and B). Both basically do the same thing; both allow users to book facilities available to them.

System A is already in production. My job is to fix any bugs that come up on said system. System B is an improved version that they wanted me to develop. This would follow a different framework etc. I am already halfway through this system.

Now, here's the fucked up part. The code for system A is a massive clusterfuck. It has unused commented code dated back to ancient times where men had the brain of an ape.

And don't get me started on the fucking logic. One part of the code was to retrieve and display the timeslots available for a chosen facility. The code to do that alone takes up 500++ fucking lines, filled with ajax commands, html manipulation and commented, unused codes..AND THAT'S JUST THE FRONTEND!

The fucking backend was not a problem of smelly code anymore. Nope. It was like a programmer had code diarrhea and shat his backend code all over the project. If I had a pin board, I would have made a crazy wall just to understand what some fucknut was trying to achieve.

Anyway, my supervisor told me to fix some bugs on System A. Knowing how the code was, I told her that I could refactor the code. Since I've already achieved that function on System B, with a shorter and cleaner code, I could just copy that and use on System A. But nope. She SPECIFICALLY told me to just "do whatever to fix the bugs. I don't want to waste time on System A." Okay. Makes sense to me. Whatever. I didn't wanna fuck my head up looking through that mess of a cesspool. So, I came up with a few hacks, not thinking of clean code and fixed whatever bugs there was. I then just pushed to the repo (after testing of course).

This bloody morning, supervisor came in and gave me more bugs to fix. When I thought she was done, she said "Hey. I saw the fix you made to the system. The bugs are fixed but the retrieval of the timeslots is now pretty slow. Could you see what is the problem?"

Slow.. She said that it was slow. And asked if I could fix it. I already told her what the problem was and she did not want me to waste time on it. But she wants me to fix it. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG IN HER BLOODY HEAD! I SWEAR TO GOD... UGHHHHH I swear I was already waterboarding her in my head. YOU WANT FAST?? How bout fucking allowing me to refactor the code?? Fucking shit head. I think I should take up yoga.

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

- Hello! Gordon's pizza?
- No sir it's Google's pizza.
- So it's a wrong number?
- No sir, Google bought it.
- OK. Take my order please ..
- Well sir, you want the usual?
- The usual? You know me?
- According to our caller ID, in the last 12 times, you ordered pizza with cheeses, sausage, thick crust
- OK! This is it
- May I suggest to you this time ricotta, arugula with dry tomato?
- No, I hate vegetables
- But your cholesterol is not good
- How do you know?
- Through the subscribers guide. We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years
- Okay, but I do not want this pizza, I already take medicine
- You have not taken the medicine regularly, 4 months ago, you only purchased a box with 30 tablets at Drugsale Network
- I bought more from another drugstore
- It's not showing on your credit card
- I paid in cash
- But you did not withdraw that much cash according to your bank statement
- I have other source of cash
- This is not showing as per you last Tax form unless you got it from undeclared income source
-WHAT THE HELL? Enough! I'm sick of Google, Facebook, twitter, WhatsApp. I'm going to an Island without internet,where there is no cell phone line and no one to spy on me
- I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport as it has expired 5 weeks ago..

So I took on a fairly big project and poured my heart and soul into it, was the biggest thing I did yet. I kept on sending beta's to the customer after each change for review! Kept on insisting that they review it, the answer was always "this looks amazing keep doing what you're doing"! After I finished and pushed everything to production.

They didn't use it for nearly 6 months! And then out of the blue they call me saying that half of the app is wrong.. WTF? Where was this information during testing! I informed them that the changes would take some time since I need to do migrations and change the whole database schema.

In which they replied "but you already finished it once won't changing things make it easier? We shouldn't pay for your mistakes"
I don't know how I handled that but they should be thankful they were half way across the country 😠😠😠😠

One Thursday noon,
operation manager: (looking at mobile)what the.....something is wrong i am getting bunch of emails about orders getting confirmed.
Colleague dev: (checks the main email where it gets all email sent/received) holy shit all of our clients getting confirmation email for orders which were already cancelled/incomplete.
Me: imediately contacting bluehost support, asking them to down the server so just that we can stopp it, 600+ emails were already sent and people keep getting it.
*calls head of IT* telling the situation because he's not in the office atm.

CEO: wtf is happening with my business, is it a hacker?

*so we have a intrusion somebody messed the site with a script or something*

All of us(dev) sits on the code finding the vulnerabilities , trying to track the issue that how somebody was able to do that.

*After an hour*

So we have gone through almost easch function written in the code which could possibly cause that but unable to find anything which could break it.

Head asking op when did you started getting it actually?
Op: right after 12 pm.

*an other hour passes*

Head: (checking the logs) so right after the last commit, site got updated too?. And....and.....wtf what da hell who wrote this shit in last commit?
* this fuckin query is missing damn where clause* 🤬

Me: me 😰

*long pause, everyone looking at me and i couldn't look at anyone*
The shame and me that how can i do that.

Head: so its you not any intrudor 😡
Further investigating, what the holy mother of #_/&;=568 why cronjob doesn't check how old the order is. Why why why.

(So basically this happened, because of that query all cancelled/incomplete orders got updated damage done already, helping it the cronjob running on all of them sending clients email and with that function some other values got updated too, inshort the whole db is fucked up.)
and now they know who did it as well.

*Head after some time cooling down, asked me the solution for the mess i create*

Me: i took backup just couple of days before i can restore that with a script and can do manual stuff for the recent 2 days. ( operation manager was already calling people and apologising from our side )

Head: okay do it now.

Me: *in panic* wrote a script to restore the records ( checking what i wrote 100000000 times now ), ran...tested...all working...restored the data.
after that wrote an apology email, because of me staff had to work alot and it becomes so hectic just because of me.

* at the end of the day CEO, head, staff accepted apology and asked me to be careful next time, so it actually teached me a lesson and i always always try to be more careful now especially with quries. People are really good here so that's how it goes* 🙂

Jr: I'm having a problem with my environment, can you help me?

Me: Sure! Did you switch to the latest Ubuntu LTS
so that your environment matches the rest of the dev team like you were asked to do the last 3 times?

Jr: No, I like Windows better because linux is too complicated. Can you just figure out how my environment is suppose to work and than fix what I did wrong please?

Me: No. Let me know if you ever need help with the our standard dev environment. Good luck!

So I once had a job as a C# developer at a company that rewrote its legacy software in .Net after years of running VB3 code - the project had originally started in 1994 and ran on Windows 3.11.

As one of the only two guys in the team that actually knew VB I was eventually put in charge of bug for bug compatibility. Since our software did some financial estimations that were impossible to do without it (because they were not well defined), our clients didn't much care if the results were slightly wrong, as long as they were exactly compatible with the previous version - compatibility proved the results were correct.

This job mostly consisted of finding rounding errors caused by the old VB3 code, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

One day, after dealing with many smaller functions, I felt I was ready to finally tackle the most complicated function in our code. This was a beast of a function, called Calc, which was called from everywhere in the code, did a whole bunch of calculations, and returned a single number. It consisted of 500 or so lines of spaghetti.

This function had a very peculiar structure:

Function Calc(...)
...
If SomeVariable Then
...
If Not SomeVariable Then
...
(the most important bit of calculation happened here)
...
End If
...
End If
...
End Function

But for some reason it actually worked. For days I tried to find out what's going on, where the SomeVariable was being changed or how the nesting indentation was actually wrong and didn't match the source, but to no avail. Eventually, though, after many days, I did find the answer.

SomeVariable = 1

Somehow, the makers of VB3 though it would be a good idea for Not X to be calculated as (-1 - X). So if a variable was not a boolean (-1 for True, 0 for False), both X and Not X could be truthy, non-zero values.

And kids these days complain about JavaScript's handling of ==...

Preface: i'm pretty... definitely wasted. rum is amazing.

anyway, I spent today fighting with ActionCable. but as per usu, here's the rant's backstory:

I spent two or three days fighting with ActionCable a few weeks ago. idr how long because I had a 102*f fever at the time, but I managed to write a chat client frontend in React that hooked up to API Guy's copypasta backend. (He literally just copy/pasted it from a chat app tutorial. gg). My code wasn't great, but it did most of what it needed to do. It set up a websocket, had listeners for the various events, connected to the ActionCable server and channel, and wrote out updates to the DOM as they came in. It worked pretty well.

Back to the present!

I spent today trying to get the rest to work, which basically amounted to just fetching historical messages from the server. Turns out that's actually really hard to do, especially when THE FKING OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION'S EXAMPLES ARE WRONG! Seriously, that crap has scoping and (coffeescript) syntax errors; it doesn't even run. but I didn't know that until the end, because seriously, who posts broken code on official docs? ugh! I spent five hours torturing my code in an effort to get it to work (plus however many more back when I had a fever), only to discover that the examples themselves are broken. No wonder I never got it working!

So, I rooted around for more tutorials or blogs or anything else with functional sample code. Basically every example out there is the same goddamn chat app tutorial with their own commentary. Remember that copy/paste? yeah, that's the one. Still pissed off about that. Also: that tutorial doesn't fetch history, or do anything other than the most basic functionality that I had already written. Totally useless to me.

After quite a bit of searching, the only semi-decent resource I was able to find was a blog from 2015 that's entirely written in Japanese. No, I can't read more than a handful of words, but I've been using it as a reference because its code is seriously more helpful than what's on official Rails docs. -_-

Still never got it to work, though. but after those five futile hours of fighting with the same crap, I sort of gave up and did something else.

zzz.

Anyway.
The moral of the story is that if you publish broken code examples beacuse you didn't even fking bother to test them first, some extremely pissed off and vindictive and fashionable developer will totally waterboard the hell out of you for the cumulative total of her wasted development time because screw you and your goddamn laziness.

Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.

I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.

(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)

But onto the story:

Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).

I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.

However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.

But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.

That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.

Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.

But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.

Ugh.

`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`

From a design meeting yesterday:

MyBoss: "The estimate hours seem low for a project of this size. Is everything accounted for?"
WebDev1: "Yes, we feel everything for the web site is accounted for."
-- ding ding...my spidey sense goes off
Me: "What about merchandising?"
MerchDevMgr: "Our estimate pushed the hours over what the stakeholders wanted to spend. Web department nixed it to get the proposal approved."
MyBoss: "WTF!? How the hell can this project go anywhere without merchandising entering the data!?"
WebDev2: "Its fine. We'll just get the data from merchandising and enter it by hand. It will only be temporary"
Me: "Temporary for who? Are you expecting developers to validate and maintain data?"
WebDev1: "It won't be a big deal."
MyBoss: "Yes it is! When the data is wrong, who are they going to blame!?"
WebDev1: "Oh, we didn't really think of that."
MerchDevMgr: "I did, but the CEO really wants this project completed, but the Web VPs would only accept half the hours estimated."
Me: "Then you don't do it. Period. Its better to do it right the first time than half-ass. How do think the CEO will react to finding out developers are responsible for the data entry?"
MerchDevMgr: "He would be pissed."
MyBoss: "I'm not signing off on this design. You can proceed without my approval., but I'll make a note on the document as to why. If you talk to Eric and Tom about the long term implications, they'll listen. At the end of the day, the MerchVPs are responsible to the CEO."
WebDev1: "OK, great. Now, the database, it should be SQLServer ..."

I checked out after that...daydreamed I was a viking.

Everyday I wake up, I just think where did humanity go wrong? What mistakes were made? How the fuck did we end up with IE? And why do people still use it?

“Don’t learn multiple languages at the same time”

Ignored that. Suddently I understood why he said that. Mixed both languages. In holiday rechecked it and it was ok.

Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things. After relearning I understood it much better.

“Don’t learn things by head” was another one. Because that’s useless. If you want to learn a language, try to understand it.
I fully agree with that. I started that way too learning what x did what y did, ... But after a few I found out this was inutile. Since then, I only have problems with Git

Another one. At release of Swift, my code was written in Obj-C. But I would like to adopt Swift. This was in my first year of iOS development, if I can even call it development. I used these things called “Converters”. But 3/4 was wrong and caused bugs. But the Issues in swift could handle that for me. After some time one told me “Stop doing that. Try to write it yourself.”

One of the last ones: “Try to contribute to open source software, instead of creating your own version of it. You won’t reinvent the wheel right? This could also be usefull for other users.”

Next: “If something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Create Backups” As I did that multiple times and simply deleted the source files. By once I had a problem no iOS project worked. Didn’t found why. I was about to delete my Mac. Because of Apple’s WWDR certificate. Since then I started Git. Git is a new way of living.

Reaching the end: “We are developers. Not designers. We can’t do both. If a client asks for another design because they don’t like the current one tell them to hire one” - Remebers me one of my previous rants about the PDF “design”

Last one: “Clients suck. They will always complain. They need a new function. They don’t need that... And after that they wont bill ya for that. Because they think it’s no work.”

Sorry, forgot this one: “Always add backdoors. Many times clients wont pay and resell it or reuse it. With backdoors you can prohibit that.”

I think these are all things I loved they said to me. Probably forgot some.

Intern's CV says they have technical skills with MS Office, MySQL and JavaScript. Last month I let my manager know that this intern doesn't really know anything, so we let her do a Freecodecamp course, after which she still cannot build a basic HTML and CSS page and doesn't understand the relationship between HTML and CSS.

My manager bought her a Laravel course for beginners and today I discovered that she also doesn't understand databases, because she tried to enter an alphabetic character into a column that only accepts integers. She doesn't read/understand the error codes thrown by the application.

She tried to access a route which she created in her Laravel app by accessing it via the phpmyadmin dashboard and called me and wasted my time by asking me why her route isn't working. She literally does not understand how computers work, or how the HTTP protocol works, even less so how a file structure works. She cannot translate abstractions to practical solutions.

She either deliberately lied on her CV to get a job, or she's just really dumb and doesn't understand what the term "technical skills" mean.

I've told my manager multiple times how I think she's in the wrong job, but they keep pushing things beyond her capabilities onto her desk. I was told I'd get an intern to help me with my work load, but I got signed up into an experiment I did not consent to (manager's words, it's an experiment to help uplift people with bad degrees and a poor background). I am not a good teacher, I hate doing it.

Tech support for Friend...
Again...

Ok...
A friend ran down the hallway to my Appartement, I opened the door for him and asked him "What The Fuck... Is wrong with you?!" He was just coughing like...
My... Laptop.... Is... Slow...
When he then eventually came to the point where he could Breath normally again I asked him to login into his by then super with shitty software bloated PC... It was a mess... A Desktop full of Shit... only Shit... I
then opened Chrome and Task Manager...
and holy shit... EVERYTHING! Literally ANYTHING was under 100% Load... Yet his shitty Fans werent spinning up... Shutdown the Laptop and opened it... not to my surprise it was full of Dust... I cleaned it and booted it again... still 100% Load... I couldnt do shit without being bombarded with porn and Hentai Ads... So... I asked him "Did you make any backups to this machine?" He was like.. "*Really long explenation* No *Really long Explenation*"
Great... i thought to myself... Then I said to him his PC was so trash that i only could Reset it to 0... He was like DO ANYTHING YOU CAN LITERALLY ANYTHING!
I then explained him, Resetting this PC Means literally 0 A Fresh start, nothing of your data will be there literally nothing...
He again Was like DO IT!
So I did... When it was done i showed him the result... He FREAKED OUT LIKE THE WORLD WAS GOING TO FUCKING END, HE SCREAMED AT ME WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE? REVERSE IT! REVERSE IT NOW!
I Then said to him, I reset it to 0, I said this would happen...
He then took his now perfectly running Laptop and Ran away...

tl;dr
Tech support for friend, Reset PC to 0, Freaked out AF...

[Little perspective: For the last 7 months I'm working in a certain project.]
[The project is full of unimaginative, non-creative devs with 0 initiative and poor technical background.]
[And they're almost all from one country which you all can figure out.]
[But I'm not going to mention it here because I don't want to come up as a racist]
[So there's US (Europeans) and THEM. 3 of US and about 10 of THEM. And we're doing 90% of all the heavy lifting]
---
Yesterday
---
D (Dev from THEM): Hi S, I have a problem with my task
Me: (sighing) Ok let's have a call
* on the call with D we were checking some stuff loosely related to task *
* code wouldn't get invoked at all for some reason *
* suddenly I realize that even if the code would invoke, D's probably doing everything wrong in it anyway *
Me (thinking): I need to double check something.
Me: I can't help you now, I'll get back to you later.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey J, I need your help, I need to clarify the work package in my mind, because I am no longer sure.
J (my European TL): Ok, fire away.
* call started *
Me: Is it true that [blahblahblah] and so D's task depends on me completing first my task, or am I losing my mind?
J: That is correct.
Me: Well she's trying to do this in [that] way, which is completely wrong.
J: You see, that's how it is in this project, you do refinements with them, split these work packages to tasks, mention specifically what depends on what and what order should things be taken in, and in some cases all tasks from given user stories should be done by one person entirely... But they do it their way anyway, assign different people to different interdependent tasks, and these people don't even understand the big picture and they try to do the things the way they think they understand them.
Me: It's a fire in a brothel.
J: Yup.
Me: I fucking love this project.
J: (smiling silently)
* call ended *
---
Me: Ok D, you can't do your task because it's dependant on my task.
D: Oh... so what do I do?
Me: I don't know, do something else until I do my task.
---
A (THEIR TL) (Oh, did I forget to mention that there are 2 TLs in this project? THEY have their own. And there are 2 PMs as well.)
A: Hey S, I need to talk
Me: (sighing, getting distracted from work again) Ok let's have a call
* call started *
A: S, we need this entire work package done by Friday EOD.
Me: I can't promise, especially since there are several people working on its several tasks.
A: D's working on hers for 3 days already, and she's stuck. We want you to take over.
Me: (sighing, thinking "great"): Ok.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey D, A instructed me to take over your task. This is actually going to be easier since you'd have to wait for mine after all.
D: Oh, ok.
---
* I switched the Assigned Person on D's task to myself on Azure *
---
This morning, email from D.
"Hey, I completed my task and it's on [this] branch, what do I do now?"

........................................
Me, hesitating between 2 ways to reply:
(and take note there are people in CC: A, J, P - the last one is THEIR PM)
1) "Hi, Unfortunately you'd still have to wait for my changes because your task is dependent on my task - the column to be changed is in the table that I am introducing and it's not merged to develop branch yet. By the way I already did your task locally, as I was instructed to do it, I'm wrapping things up now."
(y'know: the response which is kind, professional, understanding; without a slight bit of impatience)
2) WHAT FUCKING PART OF "DON'T DO THIS I WILL FUCKING DO IT MYSELF GO HOME JUST GO HOME" YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND

So I've decided if I am invited to a school career day the what I'll do is this.

1. Start by handing out one of those logic puzzles that are like Sally lives 2 houses down from Bill, Bill is 3 houses away from Maggie where does Jerry live type of thing. Then I'll tell the kids they have 10 minutes to figure it out.

2. After about three minutes I'll tell them that they also need to figure out where Jerry lives and not give them enough information to figure that out.

3. 5 minutes in I'll start asking them why it is taking so long, and it shouldn't be that hard. I'll also ask about where Phil lives who was never mentioned before.

4. At 7 minutes I'll look for anyone who might be figuring it out and tell them there is a much more important high priority problem I need them to solve and give them a new puzzle and tell them I expect them both to be done on time.

5. At nine minutes I'll start yelling at them that they must not be that good and why they haven't finished yet if any of them complain I'll tell them they are just dumb.

6. At ten minutes I'll ask them to turn it in and then immediately throw it in the trash and tell them that wasn't what they were supposed to be doing, and tell them they did it wrong.

I figure that is a pretty good representation of what working in software engineering is like.

After doing the work he requested as he wanted he was not happy. So i thought we sit and discuss what he didn't like. I was so wrong.

...
Boss: "...you know what I think you are: a fraud; Masquerading as a developer. The database design you have given is shit. The template I gave you I did in 1 hour. You took half the day."

He gave a simple template to use and he told me to come up with an ecommerce db design via downloading PrestaShop and seeing what is relevant to us.

Me: "what did I do wrong?"

Boss: "you think I don't know what PK means in database design? Why the fuck did you put this here."

Me: "can I expl..."

Boss: "I'm not finished, you been here half the month and what work have you to show for it..."

Me: "I have..."

Boss: "You shut up when I can speaking"

Me: "ok"

Boss: "You have no work to show for the time you have been here. I tell you what to do. I want someone who is proactive. My friend, you will do the work I tell you to do, you understand?"

Me: "yes but can I just say that I have been doing your work I have the contact the various developers as you..."

Boss: " You shut up when your boss is speaking. Can you do this work? (Slightly long pause)

Me: "I can do it. But, I have done the bits of the work you said I do. I was h..."

Boss "don't give me bullshit stories...you haven't done the work..."

Me: "But you have spoken"

Boss:" You know what Im giving you 1 weeks notice if you are not able to do the work. Can you do it?"

That moment!!! I was literally shaking I could have high fived his face with his laptop.

Me: "yes I can"
Boss: "Then get the fuck out of my sight and do it"

About 2 years ago, our management decided to "try outsourcing". I was in charge for coordinating dev tasks and ensuring code quality. So management came up with 3 potential candidates in India and I had to assess them based on Skype calls and little test tasks. Their CVs looked great and have been full of "I'm a fancy experienced senior developer." ....After first 2 calls I already dismissed two candidates because they had obviously zero experience and the CV must have been fake. ..After talking to the third candidate, I again got sceptical. The management, however, started to think that I'm just an ass trying to protect my own position against outside devs. They forced me to give him a chance by testing him with a small dev task. The task included the following statement

"Search on the filesystem recursively, for folders named 'container'. For example '/some_root_folder/path_segments/container' " The term 'container' was additionally highlighted in red!

We also gave him access to a git repo to do at least daily push. My intention was to look at his progressions, not only the result.
I tried the task on my own and it took me two days, just to have a baseline for comparison. I, however, told him to take as much time as he needs. (We wanted to be fair and also payed him.)

..... 3 weeks went by. 3 weeks full of excuses why he isn't able to use git. All my attempts to help him, just made clear that he has never seen or heard of git before. ...... He sent me his code once a week as zip per email -.- ..... I ignored those mails because I made already my decision not wanting to waste my time. I mean come on?! Is this a joke? But since management wanted me to give him a chance .... I kept waiting for his "final" code version.

In week 5, he finally told me that it's finished and all requirements have been met. So I tried to run his code without looking at it ..... and suprise ... It immediately crashed.

Then I started to look through the code .... and I was ..... mind-blown. But not in a good way. .....

The following is what I remember most:

Do you remember the requirement from above? .... His code implementing it looked something like this:

Go through all folders in root path and return folders where folderName == "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container".

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Alone this little peace of code was on sooooooo many levels wrong!!!!! Let me name a few.

- It's just sooooo wrong :(
- He literally compared the folderName with the string "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container"...... Wtf?!?
- He did not understand the requirement at all.
- He implemented something without thinking a microsecond about it.
- No recursive traversal
- It was Java. And he used == instead of equals().
- He compares a folderName with a whole path?!? Wtf.
- How the hell did he made this code return actual results on his computer?!?

Ok ...now it was time to confront management with my findings and give feedback to the developer. ..... They believed me but asked me to keep it civilized and give him constructive feedback. ...... So I skyped him and told him that this code doesn't meet the requirements. ......... He instantly defended himself . He told me that I he did 'exactly what was written in the requirements document" and that there is nothing wrong. .......He had no understanding at all that the code also needs to have an actual business purpose.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

After that he tried to sell us a few more weeks of development work to implement our "new changed requirements" ......

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Footnote: I know a lot of great Indian Devs. ..... But this is definitely not one of them. -.-

tl;dr
Management wants to outsource to India and gets scammed.

Boss: Client wants those stockphotos for the frontpage.

Me: ok. Please license them and let me know. I will upload them to the page.

Boss: How does that work then?

Me: you have to buy the five credit package. Here is the link...

Boss: (no response)

...few days later...

Boss: please remember to upload those images...

Me: well ok. Did you buy them?

Boss: isn't that your thing?

Me: I don't understand. You had all the info. You new where to buy them. You knew what images to buy since the client sent the preview versions. What do you need? ...and why didn't you tell me that you were waiting for my input? I was the last one to reply to this conversation.

Boss: i don't want to buy the wrong images.

Me: just buy the ones the client chose.

Boss: I don't want to look up the email he sent them in.

Me: I don't understand. I directly replied to that mail. It is in the same conversation.

Boss: ok.

...day later...

Boss sends me mail with images attached.

Boss: are those the right images?

Me: well yes. Those are the ones the client sent. I don't have more information than you.

(Me looking at the attachments and finding them in the smallest resolution available.)

Me: why did you download the images in the smallest resolution? It does not make any difference in price.

Boss: well I thought they were not needed in a bigger size.

Me: why do you make my options intentionally smaller? I am the guy doing frontend.
..please give me the login info for the stock account so I can download the images in a better resolution.

Oh man. Mine are the REASON why people dislike PHP.

Biggest Concern: Intranet application for 3 staff members that allows them to set the admin data for an application that our userbase utilizes. Everything was fucking horrible, 300+ php files of spaghetti that did not escape user input, did not handle proper redirects, bad algo big O shit and then some. My pain point? I was testing some functionality when upon clicking 3 random check boxes you would get an error message that reads something like this "hi <SENSITIVE USERNAME DATA> you are attempting to use <SERVER IP ADDRESS> using <PASSWORD> but something went wrong! Call <OLD DEVELOPER's PHONE NUMBER> to provide him this <ERROR CODE>"

I panicked, closed that shit and rewrote it in an afternoon, that fucking retard had a tendency to use over 400 files of php for the simplest of fucking things.

Another one, that still baffles me and the other dev (an employee that has been there since the dawn of time) we have this massive application that we just can't rewrite due to time constraints. there is one file with (shit you not) a php include function that when you reach the file it is including it is just......a php closing tag. Removing it breaks down the application. This one is over 6000 files (I know) and we cannot understand what in the love of Lerdorf and baby Torvalds is happening.

From a previous job we had this massive in-house Javascript "framework" for ajax shit that for whatever reason unknown to me had a bunch of function and object names prefixed with "hotDog<rest of the function name>", this was used by two applications. One still in classic ASP and the other in php version 4.something

Legacy apps written in Apache Velocity, which in itself is not that bad, but I, even as a PHP developer, do not EVER mix views with logic. I like my shit separated AF thank you very much.

A large mobile application that interfaced with fucking everything via webviews. Shit was absolutley fucking disgusting, and I felt we were cheating our users.

A rails app with 1000 controller methods.

An express app with 1000 router methods with callbacks instead of async await even though async await was already a thing.

ultraFuckingLarge Delphi project with really no consideration for best practices. I, to this day enjoy Object Pascal, but the way in which people do delphi can scare me.

ASP.NET Application in wich there seemed to be a large portion of bolted in self made ioc framework from the lead dev, absolute shitfest, homie refused to use an actual ioc framework for it, they did pay the price after I left.

My own projects when I have to maintain them.

As much as I love opensource I hate really hate some of its actvie community members (read this as "freetards" <-- see urbandictonary). As a .Net + web devloper with minimal C experience (I just started learning it) and literally no Python experience its not really easy to contribute for me to many (most) opensource software for linux. I am using some <unnamed software> and I found a <critical bug>, it was easy to reproduce and I wrote for list of possible solutions, found it in a code and linked and basically wrote a docummentation longer than any other I ever wrote for every single project I did ever, combined. This <software> was critical for my server and since owner of github repo and few other people there were really active, I hoped that this bug with pretty good documentation will be solved fast, I went to my bed with a heroic feeling of an open source community contributor that helped saving world. I was horribly wrong. Tomorrow, I got 3 passively agressive responses from owner and other 2 freetards that summed up said <other1>:"oh thats nice, fix i yourself and commit it", <other2>:"have a sex with yourself" in a nice way, and <owner>: "fix my softwate and create mrege request". After replying that I have no experience my Python skills are not on a level requied for such an action, he messaged me on twitter I have linked to my GitHub profile saying even less nicely that I am a "retarded c*nt" and that I should learn Python and fix it myself. This makes me stay with my Windows based Server for some time now, fuck this. I googled his github nickname and guess what. Our main freetard is admin on an <unnamed linux forum> and mebmber of many other "computer help" with literally half of his posts just slightly toxic posts about how everyone should use linux and how supreme it is ober anything other, the other hals was crying why linux has only 1% of market share. Oh boi I am not sure why but ITS MAYBE BECAUSE OF FREETARDS LIKE YOU.
And the funnies thing is, hes not only freetard, he is just fullstack retard. One of his posts is "helping" to some <noob windows user> installing Linux. tl:dr for this las part: Freetard basically wiped all data of that <noob>.

PS: Bless everyone who do not respond "oh nice, now you can do it yourself"

Fuck Apple and its review system

So, this started in december. We wanted to publsih an app, after years of development.

Submit to review, and passes on the first try. Well, what do you know. We are on manual release option, so we can release together with the android counterpart. Well yes, but someone notices that the app name is not what was aggreed (App Name instead of AppName). Okay, should be easy, submit the same app, just the name changed. If it passed once, it will pass again, right? HAH

Rejected, because the description, why we use the device’s camera is too general. Well... its the purpose of the app... but whatever, i read the guidelines, okay, its actually documented with exapmles. BUT THEN WHY THE FUCK COULDNT YOU SAY THAT ON THE FIRST UPLOAD?

Whatever, fix it, new version, accepted, ready to release just in time.

It doesindeed roll out,but of course, we notice that the app has a giant issue, but only on specific phones. None of our test phones had this problem, but those who have, essentially cannot use our program. Nasty as it is, the fix is really easy, done in 5 minutes. Upload it asap, literally nothing changed from user point of view, except now it doesnt crash on said devices. Meanwhile 1 star reviews are arriving from these users - of course with all the right. Apple should allow this patch quickly, right? HAH

THE REAL BULLSHIT COMES NOW

With only config files changed, the same binary uploaded we get rejected? What now? Lets read it. “Metadata rejected, no need to upload new binary”.... oh fine only the store page is wrong? Easy. Read the message, what went wrong. “Referencing third party content is nit permitted on the app store” meaning that no android test device should be shown. Fine, your rules. They even send a picutre of the offending element. BUT ITS NOT EVEN ON THE STORE. THATS A SCREENSHOT OF THE APP. HOW IS THAT METADATA? I ask about this, and i get a reply, from either a bot, or a person who cant speak or read english, and only pasted a sample answer, repeating the previous message. WTF. Fine, i guess you are dumb, but since they stop replying to our queries, do the only sensible thing, re-record the offending tutorial video that actually contained an android device. This is about 2 weeks, after the first try to apply a simple patch to a broken app. And still, how did it pass the review 2 times?

Whatever, reupload again, play the waiting game for a week, when the promised average wait time is 2 days, they hit us with a message, that they want to know what patent we use in our apps core functionality. WTF WHY NOW? It didnt bother you for a month, let it release ti production and now you delay a simple patch for this? We send them what they know. Aaaaand they reply: sorry we need more time to review your app. FUUUUUUCKKK YOUUU. You are reviewing a PATCH with close to zero functional change!!! Then, this shit goes on, every week we ask about an ETA, always asking for patience... at the end it took another 3 weeks... so december 15 to jan 21 in total...

FOR. A. SINGLE. FUCKING. PATCH

Bottom line is what is infurating, apple cares that there is an android device in the tutorial video, but they dont care that a significant percentage of our users simply cannot use the app.

Im done

Post Anger Rant (Beware, Long rant ahead)

So there is this project we have been working for months, most of the devs involved are jr students so I was leading them in the architecture and what to do and they were doing it, the progress was slow but safe and fun.

On the team there was this guy, someone I trusted and in who I had special interest for his skills, so I let him own the github repo.

So the day of the first demo I pull the backend changes ( I had been working on front end ) and I realize that the code was different, so I started using my super awesome forensic skills to find what happened,and when I say different I mean a totally different architecture different database connections, different service pirts, basically other project, so during my criminal investigation I found out this guy I trusted had never really worked with us, from the beginning he went solo working on his own project and changing everything because of some tutorial he found on the internet, so I decided to reset to the previous version just to find out that he had already deployed the code and that a lot of fixes that we should have were only on his version.

So I went and confront him telling him that he did wrong and he had to learn team work and that I was trying to teach them good practices and he waits and asks me "so, my code was wrong?" Seriously what da hell dude? I'm talking about team work and all you can think about is your code.

Finally he admitted his mistake and repented (I think), but seriously how arrogant must you be to ignore a whole team, specially when on your first real project.

I'm so close to giving up. Yesterday, I travelled 4 hours in one direction for a job interview for a graduate position as a web developer. As I arrived at the interview, I was welcomed by a senior dev and one of the HR people.

I sit down and they start explaining how everything will commence(standard procedure stuff) and afterwards hand me the technical test. At this time I am super calm cause I did my homework, checked out their products, their websites and knew right away what I was going to work on. As I turn the page, I see at the top with huge fucking capital letters "JAVA OOP test".

I take a minute and look back at them, like wtf is happening. Turns out that they are looking for a java dev. They picked me for the role because I had literally 1 fucking sentence in my CV and where I have said that I studied java in one semester of uni. FYI my entire portfolio, cv and cover letter are focused on JS, html, css both for client and server side.

As the fucking HR guy stood there and asked me "is there something wrong", I felt broken inside. For the first time in my fucking life I felt like I was done and couldn't continue anymore. I felt like this is some bitch-slap from karma about something but I still can't figure out what. I just walked out of there being unable to realize what happened.

I just feel like I should end my developer career before it has even started, just go do business analysis or something. Why the fuck would someone put a job description entirely talking about Angular, Less/SASS, bootstrap and jQuery and then say that is a Java dev OOP role. Who the fuck allows those people to take good salaries yet still deliver the up most shittiest quality service.

Before the interview, I checked out their websites which are simply horrendous with the comparability of a fucking baked potato. Idk really what to do, I don't mean to sound as a whiny little b.... but as I walked out of their office, I felt broken inside. Sorry for the long rant.

2018 was a dumpster fuck for me. I was looking for 2019.

Oh boy, I was wrong.

I had a flight booked for 3rd Jan. I was supposed to go to Delhi, back to my job.

On 2nd Jan evening, I got a high fever. 103 F and my heartbeat were around 140. My brother took me to Hospital and after the doctor checked me.

There were no other symptoms. Only high fever. The doctor told me to do some blood test and give me a dose of Antibiotic.

Next day all the result came back negative. Doctor give me 3 days of antibiotic course and told eat light.

After 3 days of getting the 4g antibiotic in my body, Nothing changed. The fever was there and no symptoms.

on the 3rd day, the doctor increases the course to 2 days and told me to get more blood test. I also had to get 4D sonography and Heart ECG and its sonography.

on the 5th day, nothing changed. I still had a high fever. All the blood test were negative.

On the 6th day, I was admitted to the hospital and my medicine was changed to high does of broad-spectrum antibiotics and lots of new blood test.

There were taking blood from one hand and giving antibiotics to another.

After the broad-spectrum antibiotics, my fever went down to normal but all the 17 blood test I did came completely negative.

On the 8th day, we went to an infection specialist. He checked all the report and ask us to do a very details sonography. After all those things he said it most likely staphylococcus infection.

So here I am, making a chart of my temperature every 2 hours and taking two tablets every day.

This last 10 was very hard. There was a point where I was thinking "this is it. I am gonna die".

I am still waiting for a very detailed blood report which takes 5 days to create. I will get it after 2 days.

So after lots of medicine and over 15+ reports, Here I am working from home.

What a wonderful start of 2019.

I was going to an interview and they kept me waiting for more than 1 hour without a notice. When the interviewer came, she didn't even apologize and gave me a form to fill out. I left the building and didn't come back. Did I did wrong? What would you do?

In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.

I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.

I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.

THEY contacted ME.

Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.

So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.

I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.

So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company

What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?

During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.

I said $1500/month straight out.

keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.

Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.

The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more

And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.

Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.

OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?

After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.

During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.

They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.

So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.

What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.

Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?

Etc

Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!

So here is my week 72 as a reviewer. But first, let me ask y'all. Am I weird to think that you should finish coding the thing and testing the thing before kicking it out to review? Cuz that's how I do it. And that is the process at my work place.

So anyway, I was doing this review. And it was very wrong. Like really, really wrong. We give a thorough intro to our product (perhaps too thorough) so this guy should have known every test case he had to cover. Or at least, if he was unsure, asked. It was all documented.

Anyway, he kicks out this peer review. First thing I notice, it is not following the standard. Fair enough, we didn't give him the coding standard. BUT HE DIDN'T EVEN MAINTAIN THE FORMAT OF THE ORIGINAL FILE. HE JUST DID HIS OWN THING!!! So I email him the coding standard and make a comment in the review. He denies the finding. No reason. Just turns it down. Strike 1.

Then, I'm going through and he didn't even cover all of the core cases. I found several core cases that he missed. And every edge case. Make a not of it. He fixes only the couple of examples I gave him. Strike 2.

Guy decided to redesign a major chunk of our interfaces. Our interfaces are not just used by us (hence interfaces). We designed them the way they were for a reason. It was not a fun design process. Myself, the architect, one of our customers, and the guy that did the implementation all told him to roll back his change. Especially since it wasn't in the scope of what he was doing. He wouldn't. Strike 3.

I go to the lead and bring him in. He has a talk with him. All of the sudden he is putting out multiple builds per finding. Like most times I will put out like 2 to 4 for the whole peer review. No he kicks out minimum one per finding and chokes the review queue. Strike 4.

Strike 5: he tells me, a former DBA, that I didn't know what I was talking about when I told him to move something into a new table, even after I told him that "while in database terms it doesn't make sense, this is for product robustness".

Strike 6: he was just a condescending asshole. Bragging about how he did this job and that job over his career. His longest position held was about 18 months. Bragged about working at my company and being some hotshot at the company: only worked here for 8 months and that was 5 years ago.

You know. I have never really wanted to fight someone after about undergrad. But he came close.

Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.

Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.

What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.

Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck

We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.

By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.

In a department wide meeting:

DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"

Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.

Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."

Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

Found a bug, reported it to the maintainer.
He then tells me to ignore it since no one noticed it (besides me).
I tell him i can't do it since it's just wrong and he can simply fix it.
Turns out he's just lazy as hell and got mad at me, so i go and fix it.
Next day boss is mad at me because i'm wasting time on tasks that it's not of my concern even knowing all my tasks were completed.
Not even a "thank you by the way".
What did i miss here?

I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.

Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.

I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.

This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.

One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.

Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation

There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.

Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.

This morning there was this window cleaner again, that actually made me remember a rant from the old box - my previous account. Repost of that coming in an hour or so :3

Turns out that he came in the morning, and I completely forgot about it. The only appointment that I had today got canceled so I was like, eh fuck it. There's been this family event yesterday that made me so fucking tired... I'll just stay in bed for a little while longer.

Apparently that window cleaner ringed my bell multiple times, haven't heard him do it but anyway.. he and the cleaning lady had the genius idea to ask my landlord whether they can just barge in my home. Way to start the day, isn't it? I thought there were burglars.

In my bathrobe and visibly pissed off (I am NOT a morning person!), I let him do the window cleaning and waited for them to get the fuck out already. Then that cleaning lady, the fucking bitch that called my landlord to break into my home without MY prior permission!!! While the window cleaner was doing his work, she proceeds to ask me this.

Cleaning lady: "I had this technical issue earlier, and since you are good with phones I thought I'd ask you."
Me (thinking): oh, here it comes.. *rolling eyes*
M: "What's the issue?"
CL: "Well my stepson has an iPhone, which he broke and we brought it to a smartphone repair shop. They repaired it twice but an hour after receipt of the fixed phone, it breaks again."
M (t): You went wrong at iPhone, and you went wrong at visiting that incompetent mofo "teknishan" twice.
M: "Well I have no experience whatsoever with iPhones, but continue."
CL: "Well, he replaced the motherboard, and some pin at the bottom.."
M (t): The fucking motherboard of all things. The whole fucking motherboard?! The last thing that I'd look at, he just replaces like that?! Fucking piece of shit. That's even worse than Apple stores. And what's up with that goddamn pin? CAN'T YOU POSSIBLY BE A BIT MORE SPECIFIC?!
M: "Given only this information, I have no idea what's wrong with it."
CL: "But you are good with these things, aren't you?!"
M: "I disassemble my own broken phones, and dick around with their motherboards. That, while I'm fully aware that in the process I can break it beyond repair. That does not make me an expert on every phone out there."
CL: …

Well what did you even expect, fucking bitch. You barge into my home, don't even have the dignity to leave for me to be able to shower and dress myself, and then you go ask shit like that? Go suck my fucking cock, and shove that iPaperweight down your ass!! How about that?!

Me : *trying to download latest version of android studio*
Google: "Your client does not have permission to get URL /studio/index.html from this server. That’s all we know."
Me: FUCK YOU GOOGLE
Me: *googles: دانلود اندروید استودیو* (which means download android studio)
*and downloads it from a random website*

It happens every goddamn time, why the fuck i can't download this shit !? Because these countries are fighting each other all the time! What did i do wrong in my life? I just want to download your fucking app to write another shitty app to continue my fucking life. I don't know shit about this wars happening, I'm just a dev like others all over the world.
Downloading an app, is that too much to ask? Well fuck you then.

Two places: At a major NYC firm, I was in charge of social media. I was also involved with an intranet community. Something went bad with the intranet community project politics and I got blamed for it even though I had emails to prove I hadn't said/done what I was accused of. But to assert their dominance, my bosses called me to their office, sat me in literally a corner of the room, and interrogated me for 2 hours. The only thing missing was the bright light in my eyes and the "good cop" part of the routine. I'm ashamed to say they "broke" me and I just gave up and did what they told me to do to "fix" it even though I hadn't done anything wrong. The bosses were old enough to be my parents, so I wonder how much of that worked its way into the psychology of it all.

The second toxic workplace was where each month the boss would come from his home by the beach to tell us plebes what new ideas he wanted us to work on. We would just get done reporting on the results of his delusions of grandeur from the month prior and he'd pull the rug out and start us on some new thing. Never got any consistent traction on anything. He was the ultimate seagull manager: fly in, make a lot of noise, poop all over everything, and leave us cleaning up the mess. Oh, and we had to change the locks because we had to fire a customer service guy who was a little bit on the ragey side of things. Because of high turnover, I had seniority within 4 months of starting there.

OK, so we had a session in which a so called Company (Some ecorise.in ) came to give Internship-Training-Program. Ok, he said it'll take 5-8 minutes, and then it took fucking 75 minutes for the session to end. Horrible blunders he made.
1) Did not tell about the company and important stuff for the first 50-60 minutes. Instead, was just focusing on why you should do an Internship, what is it's benefit, what does a company want from you. And why this Internship-Training Program is important... I mean seriously? - A training for Internship. 🤦🏻‍♂️
2) Said all the Web Developers can be Mobile App Developers with the help of just HTML and CSS.... Wow, so XAML/XML is shit now, and we will call APIs with the help of CSS rules. 🤦🏻‍♂️

OK, still I tolerated all that, then was the part when he said how much will be the stipend. It was fucking nothing, they said. That for first three months they will not give a single penny as it is training, and then IF the performance is good, then they will give stipend, and then Placement assurance. OK, that's good that they are assuring placement, but wait. Package of 2LPA INR... WTF Man, it's like $3107.28 for a whole Year.

OK, that too tolerated, then was the part when they said that they'll take the written test, I was like OK, let's see. We moved to a classroom, it went over-the-full capacity, so we moved back to the seminar hall. (Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhh), still tolerable. But then that guy realised that there were no question papers to take the test, then sent someone to get the print outs. Wasted 15+ minutes, I was burning inside.

In the whole seminar hall, I stood up and said, that when you knew there will be a test, why didn't you pre-prepared the sheets beforehand, he was like, that we didn't knew the count. But his tone was. like he got offended and Get-Lost-ed me out of the seminar.

Then even I said:
🙏🏻 - Nahi chaahiye aapki Company
(🙏🏻 - I don't want your Company).
And moved out.

But my point, I am a third Year College Student, and this Company came for our benefit, but I did so (and I am not sorry), so that's pretty obvious that the Company guy will talk (bitch) to the teachers about me, and tomorrow will be a bad day for me... But isn't it wrong on the side of the company also?
I mean, there was an attendance sheet passed in the beginning of the session, had he taken count from that and got the sheets printed, (He had almost an hour for that).
Secondly, when they knew that the count of students is more than expected, then why didn't they check for the classroom that whether the class can accommodate so many students or not. If not then something would have been planned accordingly... But no, the Guy (I guess, that small Company's Owner) got offended that a Student back-chat-ted a CEO of a so-called company, and so he just had to "Get-Lost" me. Checked the website of his Company, they have hardly done 3 Static Websites... I mean, WoW, I have done at-least 10X the work of the Company, alone!

I don't know, I feel happy that I kept my point, but I feel sad because I generally don't do this kind of thing (may be my tone was also wrong, I had other issues also, may be because of them and they all combined and this happened). I feel scared too, that I don't know what the Company guy will say to my teachers and what action will they take against me...

Because I know, none of my friends will stand with me when I go down, it's all fake here, everyone can just give sympathy, but nothing else.

I don't know why I am posting this here, and if you have read this till here, thank you. I just wanted to share my heart out... :-)

Well, the system is offline, links are broken and users are complaining! Developer, what did you do?

After some digging around the designer made a "simple change" to a csv file, add a column to include the image file name of each item...

I mean, it just shifted ALL THE COLUMNS in a csv file but what could go wrong? 🤦‍♂️

Why the fuck do people go to so much trouble to justify what they did instead of just admitting they were wrong?

The way I handle this type of people is to first ask a straightforward like "X implies Y, right?" If they answer "yes" I say "then this here isn't right" and watch them go around the world to find a justification for it not being wrong.

know what pisses me the fuck off? when the manager of another department jumps over me and goes straight to the head of my department for a request that they want from MY department.

Currently, there are 2 stupid bitches that insist on doing this fuckery. One of them keeps getting owned by our DBA since for whatever reason she sends her requests to me, just for the DBA to remind her that I ain't giving her access to shit and bla bla

The other is the head of the human resources department. It goes like this: sends wrong data, task gets delayed cuz we have to sort her shit, gets impatient, bitches at head of department and his boss about us taking long(bitch 3 hours ain't long and your shit ain't critical) just for me to reply back with images and LOOK FUCKTARD YOU MESS THIS UP red arrows showing how what she did was wrong and I had to fix it for her.

Sends a reply back only to me saying thanks, ah no pendeja, I will forward aaaaaaall of that shit to everyone else, tried throwing me under the bus? well now ima do it to you.

And fuck those 3 applications you requested, have fun adding shit manually through spreadsheets and then go eat shit and die.

Woo, rant time.

I've recently changed jobs to a new company due to a number of factors at my old job. I didn't tell my old boss (let's call him X) my expected salary, nor did I tell him which company I was going to.

However, I've been informed by someone that still works there that X has been discussing my new wage in front of everyone; he was telling everyone that I'm going to lose money by moving job and that I made a stupid decision.
I didn't leave due to money, it was due to X's inability to take constructive criticism, the constant subtle sexism of the office and just a generally bad overall feeling about the job/office going forward. Yes, I will admit that money did have a minor part in my decision to leave but I didn't verbalise that to anyone in the office, and I made X aware that my departure wasn't to do with money. I left on good terms.

I feel as though it was wrong of X to talk about his opinions on my new job in front of my ex-colleagues and friends. I don't know, maybe this is the norm and I've just been living in a cave before this, or maybe my last boss was just a bit of a douchenugget. Has anyone else had this experience?

I've got to meet up with everyone from my last place tomorrow to properly say goodbye and things.. but I'm not sure how to approach my old boss when leaving drinks are held now. Should I say anything? Should I just act as though I know nothing about it?

What would you guys do in this situation???

!dev (Please, don't take this very seriously, I'm kind of burnt out)

I'm not having a good time.

I can't even write a post to properly explain how I feel.

I feel disappointed by life and by myself in many levels. Life is disappointing. I am disappointing too.

I'm having issues to focus, can't even write a couple of lines of code.

Time to listen to some emo lofi and write about how much I hate myself.

I wished I didn't feel these feelings.
I wished I didn't regret so many things I did or didn't do.
I wished I could fucking understand everything I read, but I don't, everything I read is gibberish, every paragraph makes me feel like I'm drifting in a storm.

I wished I was happy with my career, with my job. I wished I had a true friend.
I wished I could finish one goddamn fucking project for once.

I wished there was something that made me unique, but I don't think there's any.
I just feel like an ant, and that I don't really matter.

I don't feel like I'm someone at all, I feel like I'm experiencing a dream, and a rather boring one.

Programming used to be challenging and fun for me, but it has become this dull and stressful ordeal.

The internet has shown me that I don't matter really. I remember being a little kid and believing that the internet would not discriminate you, that right from the comfort of your house you could connect to people and be cared for, and collaborate in something.

But every year that passes I see that I was wrong. I have tried to put in time into people, I have asked people how they're doing, I have cared for their projects. But there's no reciprocation.

The internet itself has become a thing where the big fish only matters. The top 1k users will get 99% of the attention.

Fuck nurture, rule competition.

What's the point of creating a github project that you think it's cool? No one will give two shits about it, it won't make a goddamn difference whether you push it or not.

You know what fucking matters? If you're an apple or google developer and have thousands of followers.

Bla, bla, bla, I'm depressed...

OMFG I don't even know where to start..
Probably should start with last week (as this is the first time I had to deal with this problem directly)..

Also please note that all packages, procedure/function names, tables etc have fictional names, so every similarity between this story and reality is just a coincidence!!

Here it goes..

Lat week we implemented a new feature for the customer on production, everything was working fine.. After a day or two, the customer notices the audit logs are not complete aka missing user_id or have the wrong user_id inserted.
Hm.. ok.. I check logs (disk + database).. WTF, parameters are being sent in as they should, meaning they are there, so no idea what is with the missing ids.

OK, logs look fine, but I notice user_id have some weird values (I already memorized most frequent users and their ids). So I go check what is happening in the code, as the procedures/functions are called ok.

Wow, boy was I surprised.. many many times..
In the code, we actually check for user in this apps db or in case of using SSO (which we were) in the main db schema..
The user gets returned & logged ok, but that is it. Used only for authentication. When sending stuff to the db to log, old user Id is used, meaning that ofc userid was missing or wrong.

Anyhow, I fix that crap, take care of some other audit logs, so that proper user id was sent in. Test locally, cool. Works. Update customer's test servers. Works. Cool..

I still notice something off.. even though I fixed the audit_dbtable_2, audit_dbtable_1 still doesn't show proper user ids.. This was last week. I left it as is, as I had more urgent tasks waiting for me..

Anyhow, now it came the time for this fuckup to be fixed. Ok, I think to myself I can do this with a bit more hacking, but it leaves the original database and all other apps as is, so they won't break.
I crate another pck for api alone copy the calls, add user_id as param and from that on, I call other standard functions like usual, just leave out the user_id I am now explicitly sending with every call.
Ok this might work.

I prepare package, add user_id param to the calls.. great, time to test this code and my knowledge..

I made changes for api to incude the current user id (+ log it in the disk logs + audit_dbtable_1), test it, and check db..
Disk logs fine, debugging fine (user_id has proper value) but audit_dbtable_1 still userid = 0.

WTF?! I go check the code, where I forgot to include user id.. noup, it's all there. OK, I go check the logging, maybe I fucked up some parameters on db level. Nope, user is there in the friggin description ON THE SAME FUCKING TABLE!!
Just not in the column user_id...

WTF..Ok, cig break to let me think..

I come back and check the original auditing procedure on the db.. It is usually used/called with null as the user id. OK, I have replaced those with actual user ids I sent in the procedures/functions. Recheck every call!! TWICE!! Great.. no fuckups. Let's test it again!
OFC nothing changes, value in the db is still 0. WTF?! HOW!?

So I open the auditing pck, to look the insides of that bloody procedure.. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Instead of logging the p_user_sth_sth that is sent to that procedure, it just inserts the variable declared in the main package..
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Did the 'new guy' made changes to this because he couldn't figure out what is wrong?! Nope, not him. I asked the CEO if he knows anything.. Noup.. I checked all customers dbs (different customers).. ALL HAD THIS HARDOCED IN!!! FORM THE FREAKING YEAR 2016!!! O.o

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

Looks like at the begining, someone tried to implement this, but gave up mid implementation.. Decided it is enough to log current user id into BLABLA variable on some pck..
Which might have been ok 10+ years ago, but not today, not when you use connection pooling.. FFS!!

So yeah, I found easter eggs from years ago.. Almost went crazy when trying to figure out where I fucked this up. It was such a plan, simple, straight-forward solution to auditing..

If only the original procedure was working as it should.. bloddy hell!!

We have a long time developer that was fired last week. The customer decided that they did not want to be part of the new Microsoft Azure pattern. They didn't like being tied to a vendor that they had little control over; they were stuck in Windows monoliths for the last 20 years. They requested that we switch over to some open source tech with scalable patterns.

He got on the phone and told them that they were wrong to do it. "You are buying into a more expensive maintenance pattern!" "Microsoft gives the best pattern for sustaining a product!" "You need to follow their roadmap for long term success!" What a fanboy.

Now all of his work including his legacy stuff is dumped on me. I get to furiously build a solution based on scalable node containers for Kubernetes and some parts live in AWS Lambda. The customer is super happy with it so far and it deepened their resolve to avoid anything in the "Microsoft shop" pattern. But wow I'm drowning in work.

We have to use this tool in work for classifying new and existing projects for GDPR. Long story short you have to fill out a REALLY long questionnaire, then it gets reviewed by someone in legal. The tool will also assign you tasks and suggest actions to common issues (e.g. suggesting a banner to explain cookie policy if you tick a certain box).

I have spent about an hour trying to re-assign the assessment I started, as i'm due to leave the company in a few days, to the guy taking over from me.

1. There is a “generate shareable URL” button, with the ability to click a button that says “replace me with the logged in user who opens this”. All it does is duplicate the name and description fields and send a new copy to that person, with no access to any of my other content or answers.

2. I did find a re-assign button eventually, again all it does it create a duplicate, and throws and error saying names must be unique when I try to save it.

3. While I couldn’t find a way to do that, I did find another button to at least assign the reviewer. It told me i’m forbidden to change the reviewer on assessments i’ve created.

This is THE WORST piece of nonsensical shit on earth. The entire application is absolute garbage and sssssssooooooo slow.

When you first create an assessment it brings you to a page that has all the questions, makes sense right? Wrong. All the questions are in read-only mode, and they are simply there as a "this is what you can expect to see later on", telling you whether or not they will be freeform, multiple choice etc.

The way to actually answer the questions is to click the "start survey" button hidden in the "status" dropdown.

I don't have much advice to anyone around GDPR, but please stay the hell away from TrustArc.

Is there anybody who startet a startUp and failed? Not to be rude, but could you please explain, what you did wrong atd what I could do better?

Two weeks into our fresh new Android app my colleague decided to define 1dp dimension unit in dimens.xml:
<dimen name="dimen_1dp">1dp</dimen>

During my code review I asked him if there was no better name for it as it's simply overstating the obvious and does not scale well for other resolutions. He didn't understand what I meant so I said would you then define this for xxdpi
<dimen name="dimen_1dp">4dp</dimen> just because you need more padding on higher density screens?

Then he goes on for 10 minutes how he thought about other names (doesn't say which ones) and still decided to stick with this one.

I politely heard him out and made it abundantly clear that I disagree with that naming (not the value). And I also backed up my point by saying that what he did is exactly the same as defining a color in colors.xml like this:
<color name="color_FFFFFF">#FFFFFF</color>

Then he frowned and said (paraphrasing): Noooooooo, that is so wrong. I would never do that. It's not the same as what I have done.
Then he again started defending his point which probably would have gone for good 10 minutes except I literally bit my tongue and walked away from my desk hoping he wouldn't follow as I was dangerously close to punching him!

Fucking enganeers!!!

Do you have a ‘Drama Queen’ on your team?
This happened last week.
DK = Drama Queen
DK: “OMG..the link to the document isn’t working! All I get is page not found. I’m supposed to update the notes for this project…and now I can’t! What the _bleep_ and I supposed to do now?!...I don’t understand how …”
This goes on for it seems 5 minutes.
Me: “Hold on...someone probably accidently mistyped the file name or something. I’m sure the document is still there.”
DK: “Well, I’ll never find it. Our intranet is a mess. I’m going to have to tell the PM that the project is delayed now and there is nothing I can do about it because our intranet is such a mess.”
Me: “Maybe, but why don’t you open up the file and see where the reference is?”
DK: “Oh, _bleep_ no…it is HTML…I don’t know anything about HTML. If the company expects me to know HTML, I’m going to have to tell the PM the project is delayed until I take all the courses on W3-Schools.”
Me: “Um…you’ve been developing as long as I have and you have a couple of blogs. You know what an anchor tag is. I don’t think you have to take all those W3 courses. It’s an anchor tag with a wrong HREF, pretty easy to find and fix”
DK: “Umm…I know *my* blog…not this intranet mess. Did you take all the courses on W3-Schools? Do you understand all the latest web html standards?”
Me: “No, but I don’t think W3 has anything to do the problem. Pretty sure I can figure it out.”
DK: “ha ha…’figuring it out’. I have to know every detail on how the intranet works. What about the javascript? Those intranet html files probably have javascript. I can’t make any changes until I know I won’t break anything. _bleep_! Now I have to learn javascript! This C# project will never get done. The PM is going to be _bleep_issed! Great..and I’ll probably have to work weekends to catch up!”
While he is ranting…I open up the html file, locate the misspelling, fix it, save it..
Me: “Hey..it’s fixed. Looks like Karl accidently added a space in the file name. No big deal.”
DK:”What!!! How did you…uh…I don’t understand…how did you know what the file name was? What if you changed something that broke the page? How did you know it was the correct file? I would not change anything unless I understood every detail. You’re gonna’ get fired.”
Me: “Well, it’s done. Move on.”

What.. the actual... fuuuuuck?!

Browsing through changes on TFS (yeah, yeah boo me for using TFS instead of git if you like, I don't care, most people use/prefer TFS here, so I conform 'to the standards'..)

Anyhow, going through changes, looking for the one where some comment appeared..

'a wild comment appeared'.. tadaaah!

Checked the rest of changes.. Hm.. Someone did a validity check.. that returns the 'false' if not passed.
// OK, great! They are finally testing their shit and fixing stuff..
But apparently then they decided it is OK to do all the shit anyways.. so WTF?!
Why even bother validating it?! Oh yeah, forgot... cuz in case it returned false YOU WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO LET SOME STUFF HAPPEN!! But they weren't assigned with that exact task I guess..

TO DO:
- do the validation algo // fml, not going into how fucked up that was written..but it was horrible!
- do validity check where appropriate/needed
- test validity check and that it doesn't break functionality

+ check if the validation actually logically works?! nope, not on my to do list, not my job..

All done, better not actually do something that requires you to think.. :\

How the fuck that happened?! How can one person be assigned to check if something is stupid/wrong?! and when checking (&confirming) still lets the customer do that shit anyways?! What's the point?! O.O

I work as the entire I.T. department of a small business which products are web based, so naturally, I do tech support in said website directly to our clients.

It is normal that the first time a new client access our site they run into questions, but usually they never call again since it is an easy website.

There was an unlucky client which ran into unknown problems and blamed the server.
I couldn't determine the exact cause, but my assumption was a network error for a few seconds which made the site unavailable and the user tried to navigate the site through the navbar and exited the process he was doing. It goes without saying but he was very angry.

I assured him there was nothing wrong with the site, and told him that it would not be charged for this reason. Finally i told him that if he had the same problem, to let me know instead of trying to fix it himself.

The next time he used the site I received a WhatsApp message saying:
- there is something clearly wrong with the site... It has been doing this for so long!
And attached was a 10 second video which showed that he filled a form and never pressed send (my forms have small animations and text which indicates when the form is being send and error messages when an error occurs, usually not visible because the data they send is small and the whole process is quite fast)

To which I answer
- It seems that the form has not been send that's why it looks that way
- So... What an I supposed to do?
- click send
It took a while but the client replied
- ok

To this day I wonder how much time did the client stared at the form cursing the server.

Partner of ours claimed they are going to update their api. No breakage. My hopes were low and they did not disappoint.

Soon after the new version of their api went live, of course, loads of breakage. And the email contact with them is really fun.

Me: "Hello, since your update we get the issue A. Here's the complete communication."

Them: "We did not change the existing behavior. You are doing X wrong. Repeat that one call during the step and you should be fine."

Me: "Thank you, if I repeat the call, it does indeed work, albeit slower, since we are now repeating calls. Furthermore, our application was consuming your api for years and we did not change anything. So why is that step necessary now? Only after your update do our logs show errors from your API. And by the way, we now also have a issue with B. Why is that?"

Them: "Oh that's because your query the endpoint with "Fnord", try "Baz".

Me: "Yes, I do know that we query it with "Fnord" as that is what a previous endpoint of yours is responding to us. Why are we getting "Fnord"? What request do I have to make to get a "Baz" back?"

It feels like a game of wackamole. Squash one issue, ten more will pop up. I am one step away from becoming active-aggressive.

Got my first Webdev job at a small marketing company, felt very lucky as I didn't have much experience. Turns out I'm the only one that could program. The other guys just use Wordpress. It felt wrong at first, using plugins instead of developing, but we got results and clients were happy. I felt like there was a lot less to this development thing than I'd previously thought! And so we continued.

But I noticed that some of our more plugin heavy sites (not made by me - these were made in some drag/drop Wordpress interface) were running slow. I mean 15 seconds load time slow. I joined devRant around the same time and discovered that no - this is not what normal development actually is. Wordpress seems universally hated. Thank god, because something seemed very wrong!

So with us getting complaints all over the place over page speed from relatively high-profile clients, I've gone and set up a script on a server that downloads the whole front end of these Wordpress sites and serves them up instead of the 'real' thing. Did I mention that there's basically no dynamic content on most of these sites? It works like a charm! I'm now trying to figure out how to get forms and route them into the real, hidden version of the site, as well as automatically updating the html views whenever the client changes anything in the Wordpress backend. Not sure if this has fixed the problem or just enabled bad practice, but I don't think I'm going to be able to stop the others from doing things this way...

For the record, yes there are plugins that do similar stuff but I thought it'd be nice to never use plugins again! And hey, I got to learn all about bash scripting so I can't complain.

For real though, I didn't quite realise how bad the Wordpress thing really was until I came here. Thanks for making me aware, all!

Ordering a Pizza in 2022.

CALLER: Is this PizzaHut?

GOOGLE:No sir, it's Google Pizza

CALLER: Sorry, I have dialled wrong number.

GOOGLE: No sir, Google bought Pizza Hut last month.

CALLER:Ok, I would like to order a pizza.

Google:Do you want your usual, sir?

CALLER: My usual? You know me?

GOOGLE: your last 12 orders shows, extra-large pizza with cheeses, sausage on a thick crust

CALLER: Awesome! That's what I'll have.

GOOGLE: sir, we suggest you try our Gluten free veg pizza?

CALLER: What? I don't want a veg pizza.

GOOGLE: Your cholesterol is not good, sir

CALLER: How the hell do you know that?

GOOGLE: Well, we cross-referenced your home phone no. with your medical records

CALLER: Ok, but I don't want your rotten veg pizza! I have taken medication for my cholesterol.

GOOGLE: But your medication wasn't regular. you just bought 30 cholesterol tablets once,4 months ago from Loyd pharmacy.

CALLER: I bought more from another pharmacy.

GOOGLE: That doesn't show on your credit card statement.

CALLER: I paid in cash.

GOOGLE: But you did not withdraw enough cash according to your bank statement.

CALLER: WTH man! I'm going on island to live without internet & social media.

GOOGLE: I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport. It expired 6 weeks ago.

What can we do with a boss who urinates in a cup in his office and then dumps it in the kitchen sink even when we (all women) are sitting there eating lunch?

We are certain of what is in the cup because it smells, is yellow, and it sits right on his credenza in plain view. He’s even left it outside the office, forgetting to empty it.

A few weeks ago I was washing my lunch dishes and he dumped it right on top of my stuff. I was pretty much in shock, I just couldn’t believe it.

Is there something wrong here that I’m not getting? He’s the owner, the boss, in his 70’s, and very respected, but I don’t understand this. No one knows what to say. We feel that if we said something, he would deny it and since he’s the boss, who knows what would happen. Is there any way to approach this? The only other males in the office are related to him. Someone did mention it to one of them, but nothing has changed.

!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 :)

Why the fuck did you guys change my vps to read only file system.

WHAT IS FUCKING WRONG WITH YOU, THIS IS LIKE THE 6TH TIME.

What do you expect to tell my clients?

I should look into if I have legal rights to migrate everything to a more stable provider.

Sick and tired of having issues because other people fck up. It's a shame I have been using this provider for 5 years without any problems. And now servers left and right start having problems.

Swear to god, I'm worse than a cat.. my fascination & curiosity will get me killed someday.. o.O

12:19 - Magnitude 6,4 earthquake 3 km from Petrinja, Croatia..

Felt it in Ljubljana..and my stupid ass was fascinated.. :/

Yup, you read it right, not scared or whatever the hell should people feel when earthquake happens..just fascinated..and curios...and in full analysis mode..

Oh tremors?! Yup, something's definitely shaking.. Eartquake? Yup, earthquake! Woow, huge earthquake.. Where is epicenter?! Also long one.. nice, never felt it like this before.. hm.. x, should we go out? How?! I know an elevator is a no go, stairs also do not look promising..better stay in I guess.. hm..still going...feels weird.. Ok, look for shelter I guess.. wow..that's a long one.. ok, doorways should be safe-ish?! Where's x? He went silent..go check up on x.. x is fine, he's not stupid like me, and unlike me also has preservation instinct to not stand under the doorway that has glass components in it.. DumbAss.. Shaking stops... Well that was weird..also I didn't have time to analyze everything..or record it! Stoopid! How did I not think of this before?! Recording would be awesome!! shame..

I know panic doesn't help anyone, but FFS, sometimes I do wish my head would panic at least for a second instead of trying to analyze everything..

I mean, WTF is wrong with me?! Most people would be scared, I just estimated that it's not that dangerous for us and no use/not smart to try to go out of the building so I just took shelter (not a good one, I know now for next time?! o.O what next time?!idiot!!) and started observing.. DumbAss.. :/

Was forced to do some work on Windows this week (CAD tools that runs only on Windows). I spent a few days just setting up the tools. There were quite a few things I realized I forgot about Windows (as compared to Linux).

1) Installation times are down right horrific. What exactly are the installer doing for 10 minutes?
2) .NET is a cluster fuck. Not even Microsofts repair tool can fix it, but rather just hangs. I ended up using another tool to nuke it and reinstall.
3) Windows binary installs are insanely huge, thus, takes forever to download.
4) The registry is a pointless database that must have been written in hell with the single intent of destroying users will to live. The sole existence of the registry is another proof that completely incompetent engineers designed Windows.
5) Rebooting is the only way to solve many problems. This is another sure sign of a fundamentally fucked up OS design.
6) What the heck is wrong with the GUIs designers? The control panel must be the worst design ever. There are so many levels to get to a particular setting I'm getting dizzy. Nothing gets better by the illogical organisation.
7) Windows networking. A perversion of the tcp/ip stack that makes it virtually impossible to understand a damn thing about the current network configuration. There are at least 3 different places that effects the settings.
8) Windows command prompt. Why did they even bother to leave it in? The interpreter is as intelligent as retarded donut. You can't do anything with it, except typing "exit" and Google for another solution.
8) Updates. Why does it takes hundreds of updates per month to keep that thing safe?
9) Despite all updates that is flying out of Redmond like confetti, it is still necessary to install antivirus to keep the damn thing safe. That cost extra money, and further cost you by degrading performance of your hardware.
10) Window performance. Software runs like it was swimming in molasses. The final stab in the back on your hardware investment, and pretty much sends performance on your hardware back a few hundred bucks more.
11) Closed source is evil. If something crash consistently, you might find a forum that address the issues you have. Otherwise you're out of luck. On the other hand, it might be for the better. I imagine reading the code for Windows can lead to severe depression.

I'm lucky to be a Linux dev, and should probably not complain too much... But really, Windows, go get yourself hit by a truck and die. I won't miss you.

Every time I tell a more senior dev I need help, they tell me to try the obvious things, I tell them I tried those things already, and they think I must have just done it wrong. So they spend an hour explaining to me how to do something I literally just did, and then more time trying the exact same things I just tried. Nobody wins.

Except for me when I find the correct solution while they’re re-implementing the failed solutions because nobody trusted me.

Sadly, this happens all the time. “Did you try a and b?” “Yeah, no luck.” “Okay, so when you try a, you have to remember to call c and d. Let me explain...”

So much wasted time. But the silver lining is in getting to be the one who found the solution (until they wonder ‘why’d she even come to me anyway if she knew the answer?’ ... 🙄) Because I trusted you to know what “team” means, and it’s not too late to learn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This was some time ago. A Legendary bug appeared. It worked in the dev environment, but not in the test and production environment.

It had been a week since I was working on the issue. I couldn't pinpoint the problem. We CANNOT change the code that was already there, so we needed to override the code that was written. As I was going at it, something happened.

---
Manager: "Hey, it's working now. What did you do?"
Me: *Very confused because I know I was nowhere close to finding the real source of the problem* Oh, it is? Let me check.
Also me: *Goes and check on the test and prod environment and indeed, it's already working*
Also me to the power of three: *Contemplates on life, the meaning of it, of why I am here, who's going to throw out the trash later, asking myself whether my buddies and I will be drinking tonight, only to realize that I am still on the phone with my manager*
Me again: "Oh wow, it's working."
Manager: "Great job. What were the changes in the code?"
Me: "All I did was put console logs and pushed the changes to test and prod if they were producing the same log results."
Manager: "So there were no changes whatsoever, is that what you mean?"
Me: "Yep. I've no idea why it just suddenly worked."
Manager: "Well, as long as it's working! Just remove those logs and deploy them again to the test and prod environment and add 'Test and prod fix' to the commit comment."
Me: "But what if the problem comes up again? I mean technically we haven't resolved the issue. The only change I made were like 20 lines of console logs! "
Manager: "It's working, isn't it? If it becomes a problem, we'll work it out later."
---

I did as I was told, and Lo and Behold, the problem never occurred again.

Was the system playing a joke on me? The system probably felt sorry for me and thought, "Look at this poor fucker, having such a hard time on a problem he can't even comprehend. That idiotic programmer had so many sleepless nights and yet still couldn't find the solution. Guess I gotta do my job and fix it for him. I'm the only one doing the work around here. Pathetic Homo sapiens!"

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that it's over but..

What the fuck happened?

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

One of those days when i feel like complete shit and wish i hadn’t woken up.
I heard back from an interview i did last week (one of the faang type) and the recruiter started with “You didn’t impress any of your interviewers”. Man that hurt. I can’t unhear that. He went ahead to say they all recommended a mid-level role for me (they apparently said i had potential and could easily grow into a senior eng) instead of the senior lead i applied for. This is also subject to getting approval to hire mid-level engineers because the team needs more people but they only got approval to hire senior engineers. This cunt also added “dont worry about it. Just go about your usual business and i’ll call you next week if we have gotten the approval”. Ass! All i can do is worry because that is what i do best.
I think i am more sad and disappointed in myself because i thought the interviews went well. Wrote decent code and came up with good solutions on time. Had a good conversation with interviewers. Apparently for a senior, you cannot make mistakes which i did but once the interviewer gave me a clue, i got back on track.
Anyway, i slept with this anxiety, then woke up with tummy ache. On the drive out this morning to go to the bank, i drove my car into a pole and broke off my side mirror. Then my fucking power generator stopped working. And on my way to go and get my fixed mirror from the mechanic, my exhaust pipe broke in half due to a possible pothole i drove into.

Those fucking days where all that could go wrong goes wrong. My head is fucking pounding i can barely move my head without wincing. I am running out of money fast (i support my entire family) and i am worried about not getting a job. This blow to my confidence makes me feel worthless like i am not good for anything. Recruiter suggested i do another senior engineer interview for a different team which i passed the test for but i know the outcome would most likely be the same and i wanted the first team really bad. I just want to lie in bed and cry all day but this fucking headache won’t let me.

Teaching new devs, hired straight from India.

This is today.

Bug1: We have four lists, each item in these lists has a variable called "Charge". This var is a double and we need to convert it to currency.

Dev creates fifth list called "All lists" and converted it's charge to currency then questioned why it didn't work.

I explained, his solution? Convert each list into currency.

I explained that's wrong and told him what he needed to do. He did List1:Charge into currency, but left his other conversion in place just in case.

I walked him through fixing it which took 10 times as long as necessary, only to find out he randomly converted four booleans into currency for no reason.

Bug2: we take integer, convert to string and concat "Months" on the end.

Doesn't work for him, tells me he doesn't know why.

I told him that he's not outputting the variable that we did it to, he is instead outputting a custom variable he made and didn't do anything to.

Bug 3: followup to #2, he fixed it as I instructed, but then added months as static text to the output so now it reads "Months months".

Bug 4: to make his code cleaner, he presses enter in the text box. Unfortunately he did that IN A STRING so his output is full of random /r/n

How do you guys deal with coworkers like this? He isn't new, this is supposed to be an experienced developer. Im only in my 2nd year

Ohh man i fucked up bad. 5 days as intern, and i fuck up really bad with my ego and ignorance.

I love my this company. A great environment, lots of people to learn from , i am given reasonable tasks and i feel happy to complete them. But what happened today was weird and fucked up.

I have never worked at a place with seniors designers tech leads and more people with positions. I have also worked with a lot of competitive people who are always in a race to be first.
And how do we come first? Have a lot of knowledge, hear the smallest of detail and sprint towards goal (because the combination your knowledge, assumptions and speed is enough to make you reach to the top). You don't ask for specific details, because they are obvious. And that's me in short.

Today i fucked up.
Mistake #1 ) first i was given a small task by my senior. It was a 20 mins task max if i had done it the normal noobie way . But i am a pro in mind , i have to do it with all the architecture , even if i don't understand why. So i asked for 50 mins. They gave it and did not had a problem with my time, but with the way i wrote my code.

He was like "who told you to make it like this ? Why did you made it like this?" And was visibly irritated. And i was like super chill saying "i don't know the why, but i know its correct way of using it" , pissing him even more. In my eyes he's just a super friendly sr, more like a bro and wouldn't mind some cheeky answers. And he didnt show any
consequences for that time.

Mistake #2 this is super fucked up. Our office is going under some renovation & interns were asked to sit in the co-working spaces (outside of the office). It was already very disturbing and i had to go to office every few minutes.

So after lunch this happens : We are working on a new module that already has a tonne of screens and logics. I have made a small part which is from the middle and now we can go both in the forward or in the backward direction.(Also, its quite a new module whose idea was recently discussed and decided. And weirdly i am also being treated like a core member as the ceo once himself asked what would he my flow for doing things in this. i am in direct contact and under direction of backend , designers , ceo and My senior and many ppl are giving me tasks ) And... Aagh fuck it. .. its a long story and i don't feel like repeating it but

inshort :

got a task,

didn't understood it completely and thought its my task to figure it out, took a long time figuring it my self ,

techlead/designer somehow changed my and my sr. direction of flow even tho we were taking a different approach

I sit in a noisy and irritating place

Techlead/designer comes during the time when i am figuring out the solution(already overtime the one in point #2) nags for result.

I get in an argument with him, justifying for my time and arguing that it's difficult to think technical logics for that design
( truth be told, it WAS a difficult logic which he thought was too easy. It consisted of 3 variables and 8 states we were doing different works for 4 of them and rejecting 2 and ... I don't know, i had got that wrong . But that shouldn't had been my problem to solve. I should have gone to my senior and didn't get into argument with tech lead ). It think i might have offended him too.

After he left, i am so angry on him that after sometime my senior comes and i misbehave with him. He just asks to meet me before i go, and i do so. During the meeting we discuss this whole fuck up and how many times i showed him my ego and indiscipline. And then i realise what a fuckup i did due to my ego and lack of asking, blindly following my own over confidence and blindly following or arguing with others.

Fuck fuck fuck

I've got a rant-type question:

Why would you EVER use Google Chrome?

There are a million browsers in the world, you could've used Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Bad Wolf, Qute, st, Epiphany etc, but you chose to uss Google Chrome.

What would be the reason you would ever choose Google Chrome over any of the million browsers, out of which many of them get the job done much better than Chrome? Okay, I get it why you might use IE or Edge, cause you might be too lazy to install any other browser or you just want the performance benefits you get with Edge which totally, most definatelly, a very big plus point for Edge.

*"Chrome has a balanced-bloat out of all browsers"*
But how tf does that matter? That doesn't even help performance wise anyways.

I can't get over the fact that I have to see/hear about 'Chrome hogging RAM' EVERYWHERE. Like, why do you even care about the god damn browser? Why is it a standard over the million other browsers that exist? Why can't the general public be educated that browsers have choices (just like phones) and you don't have to spit crap over people who don't use Chrome.

It just drives me crazy of how many people hate Chrome, and still it's a 'default' browser.

I would quote Vivaldi (the company/browser):
'A browser should adapt to you, not the other way around.'

(Disclaimer: Rant of a former Firefox, qute, st, Opera, OperaGX, Edge, and ofcourse, Chrome user. Currently in deep love with Vivaldi.)

I'm done ranting. Have a nice day!

(My first post here, if I did something wrong, let me know! I'll make sure I don't do it again!)

This is gonna be depressing. You have been warned.

I am getting sick of people, moreso than I usually would. It's getting to the point where I'm feeling like I want complete isolation from people. Why do people get pissed at me then not tell me what I did wrong? How the fuck am I supposed to fix it?

One of my friends, S, has a lot of issues, and I've been friends with her for many years. I try to help her as much as I can because I actually care, but she rarely responds to any texts and disappears for days at a time. Then she comes back and says I worry too much and plays it off like it was nothing. Wtf?!

I give everyone hugs. If you want a hug, you'll get one from me no questions asked. I do this because I'm actually incredibly depressed and the hugs help me feel less lonely. I'm getting tired of caring so much for everyone else and having nobody actually care about me. S says that I care so much BECAUSE I don't want anyone else to feel that way, but it hurts like hell when I'm the only one who cares.

I don't care what people think about me in a sense that if they have a problem, fuck off. I do, however care that nobody seems to actually CARE. I HATE THIS SHIT. I'm getting to that point where I don't want to die, I just don't want to exist like this. Fuck everything at this point. Nobody ever responds to texts, they get pissed for no reason, just fuck it.

As a freelancer I get side requests from bigger development companies from time to time that don't have the time or capacity to deal with it themselves.

So usually the employees are pretty friendly but they do not like to read any of the documentation I send with the code. They call me up with stupid questions that are usually answered in the documentation.

I had sent them everything they had requested last Thursday so they called me on Friday to ask the usual stupid question. However, this time I had beforehand decided to have some fun! I told them I had to leave for the weekend and to call me back on Monday. Of course they called me during the weekend, but I didn't answer. So they called me today.

What I had done before handing it all in was I had named the methods that I wrote illogically, while stating and explaining the whole situation in the documentation extra clearly.

So I answered the call today and the first thing they did was apologize. Since I didn't answer their calls during the weekend they finally realized that the best way to go is reading the documentation instead of calling me all the time. They were freaked out at first because they thought there was something completely wrong with the code and they had to tell their client that the deadline had to be pushed back.

We are all good now :)

Fresh internship story (Part 2)

I just realized how dumb my temporary boss really is and how much he loves to command everyone.
I told him that I am going earlier a few days ago and he got pissed lol.
He is someone who thinks he knows everything, but he does not.
He blames everything on everyone else.
He is never wrong, we are always wrong. That is probably what he is always thinking.
Clients who enter the store are precious (makes sense-you have to handle clients well, to get more bucks), but the thing is that he even screams near the clients at us. Besides of that I am new there. Be a little bit more patient, fucking prick.
Imho he is too old for the tech industry.
He loves to use the workers as slaves.
Do you work on a laptop rn? Well... fuck that. He has a new task waiting for you.
He keeps interrupting me every 5 to 10 minutes while I am focused.
Random dialogue from today:
me:"the client did a win10 upgrade and not a regular windows update"
boss:"nope. that is a windows update."
me (internally): should I show him the folder called "Windows10.Upgrade" and the "windows.old" folder both with the same creation date in "c:"? nah, fuck that. he is gonna put himself up again. do not want to have a stronger headache than this one I am having rn. (btw. I usually do not have headaches. I get headaches like once in 5 years, but since 4 days I have it every day.)
I am sick of this.
Today I had the urge to fucking grab his fucking "fuck me please" eyes out and eat them while he hears the explosive sounds his seperated eyes do. I still want to enjoy the rest of my life without going into a prison tho.

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.

Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting my time, I've been programming for the last 6 years, day and night, I know more than all the teachers I've had for the last years (including university), during programming classes at university I'm just there to help my friends and try to avoid they get bad habits (our professor didn't have this luxury apparently), but I don't feel the emotions I used to feel when I started, for the last month or so the only code I've written was two days ago to help the girl I like, when I'm home I try to force myself to code but I can't find the inspiration, I stare at the screen for 30 minutes, I reboot my pc, start windows and play videogames 'till night...
Then I go to youtube, and see artists and musicians, I feel like I can't do anything that cool...
Have anyone of you ever felt the same? What did you do to recover? I still love programming, but I can't find any reason to do it, I still don't have an original and interesting concept for a game, I have many side projects in the "maybe I'll continue it" stash, is there something wrong with me or is it normal?

Owner of the company I freelance for: The proposal I sent yesterday to [PR Company we do work for] got bounced back. They said it was incomplete.

Me: Well no shit, they didn't provide us with a detailed itinerary of everything they need, nor did they give us access to sections that they want copied to the new website. I can't and won't provide a full quote when I don't have all the information needed to build one. I would be guessing at this point and it would be shitty guesses.

Owner: Here's a proposal they got from another company. We need to make it like this [sends file].

Me: They mention a one sentence footnote about what I laid out. Everything else is marketing jargon that I don't know, because I'm a developer, not a marketer. I'm not sure what it is you want me to do, because you're asking the wrong person.

Owner: Are you going to help me or not?

Me: Help you with what? You got my notes. Paraphrase them if you need to, but I have more important things on my agenda, like being a web developer, not a proposal drafter.

A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.

Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.

Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.

Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.

So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.

Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.

Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.

So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.

You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.

Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.

Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?

It’s perfect that this week’s topic is “Most awkward video meeting” because I just had two.

The first one was to demonstrate a software process. I had everything lined up and perfectly (or so I thought) ready to demo, kind of like a cooking show. Except the deployment totally failed. I’m still struggling to figure out why several hours later. Luckily I’m getting a second shot at it soon and they weren’t mad.

Then I went and took a shower. Checking out my eyebrows in the mirror, I decided they were getting overgrown, so I took out a trimmer with a guard on it to thin them out a little. Except for some STUPID and INEXPLICABLE reason I TOOK THE GUARD OFF right before I shaved off the right eyebrow almost to the skin! I couldn’t believe it. It was like my brain sabotaged me knowing I had an important video call coming up where I might be making a ton of money if all went well.

What the hell was wrong with me?! What could I do?! I stood there cursing my existence and making plans to become a hermit in the desert. Well, I couldn’t do that. And I still had a video call in a few minutes. I couldn’t just leave one eyebrow unshaven. So, I did the only thing I could do. I cropped the left one and tried to make it match as much as possible.

It wasn’t terrible, but it was definitely noticeable on HD video and certainly up close and in person when my wife and kids returned home soon. I started panicking and wondering just how I could literally save face after idiotically mutilating my face for all to see.

Then, I got an idea.

Now, I’m a manly man. At least, I consider myself to be. I don’t shave my eyebrows for any kind of metrosexual caché. I do it because if I don’t the grease from my face that gets into my brows eventually transfers to my glasses and then I get annoyed by all the smudges. As a dad who was never comfortable when my girls wanted to put makeup on me, I suddenly became aware that their massive trove of makeup “stuff” might just save my bacon!

So, I snuck into their bathroom and, lo and behold, the exact right shade of color for my missing brow brooms was sitting right on the counter. I dabbed a little on each finger tip and carefully (oh so carefully) tinted the area mangled by my apparent dementia.

It was actually pretty amazing how it all turned out. Even on HD video it was undetectable. And when the true test occurred…i.e. my wife and kids returned home and I had to talk to them face-to-face, absolutely NO ONE was any the wiser!

Now I gotta figure out how to keep up this charade for at least a week, maybe two. I hope they don’t put that makeup tray away somewhere where I can’t…oh, wait, they never put anything away. I’m good.

I once agreed to maintain and develop an application used in a different section of the school to keep inventory and make sure everything is where it is supposed to be.

At first there was enthusiasm, together with 2 of my classmates we agreed and git clone-d the .NET application that now graduated students built and maintained for the past few years. What could go wrong right?!

It became clear that the original students that worked on it followed an older curriculum, meaning they still got taught .NET instead of the core variant that we get now, not only that but it also seemed that they either did not fully grasp the Clean/Onion architecture or didn't get it in class since there were infrastructure components in the 'Domain' project of the solution. Think of 2 DBContexts in the domain model, yep.

One of us bailed in the first week, the other one and I felt bad for the people using the app so we went on and tried to work on the first bugs that were described in a document. One of these bugs was 'whenever I filter on something in the list, everybody gets to see that filter on their screen instead of only me'. Woah that's weird! Let's see how they put that together!

Oh god, they are using a _static_ variable to store filters, no wonder that it doesn't work properly. Ever heard of sessions?!

Second bug: Sometimes people can't create an account when we sign them up from the admin panel. Alright that is weird, let's figure that one out! Wait a second it seems to work in development? What's this about.

Oh wait I can't create an account on production either? Oh that's weird, wait a second... Why do I have to put my e-mail in a form that was sent to me through e-mail? Why is my address not filled in already? OOH, if someone types in the wrong e-mail address (which is easy since our school has 4 variants of the same f*cking e-mail address) it won't work since it can't recognize the user! Brilliant! Remove e-mail input box and make a token/queryparam determine the user account.

Ah that seems good, it's a mess but it seems a tiny bit better now, great! We're making progress and some sweet buck.

Next bug, trillions of 50x errors on random pages, that's a weird one.

Hm everything works in development, that's odd. Is the production data corrupted?

DID I MENTION that in order to get into the system in development we have to load in a f*cking production database backup ON OUR DEVELOPMENT MACHINE and then ask one of the users' password to login to it and create an account for ourselves? Seeding? What's that, right?!

Anyway, back to bug fixing. I e-mail the the people responsible for the app and get a production admin account, oh I also can't ssh into it because of policies so I have to do everything over e-mail and figure out what's causing the errors. I somehow also wonder if they have any kind of virtualization in place, giving students a VM to do that stuff in doesn't seem so weird does it ? Even with school policies?

Oh btw, 'deploying' means sending a .zip file to a guy in another building and telling him how to configure it, apparently this resulted in a missing folder that the application needed to work and couldn't make on its own. This after 2 weeks of e-mailing back and forth.

After 3 months i quit out of despair and sadness, and due to the fact that I just couldn't do it anymore. I separated everything into logical subprojects and let the last guy handle it, he was OK with that and understood why I left.

Luckily, around that time I already had an actual job at a software development company :)

So, my crush told me how she lost her 800+ bookmarks related to her very crucial project (She isn't into computers). I told her she could recover them and I'll help her with the steps. She was so paranoid about losing the rest of the project if something were to go wrong while recovering.
Bookmarks got recovered. She's happy.( I just took the bookmarks.bak file from the chrome folder and converted it to an html doc.)

4 days later-
Her: dude, what the fuck did you do. The whole system has been reset. The whole project is gone. Fucking know-it-all. She thinks I'm responsible for the system restore.
- - - - - -

She's going to HATE me for life 😭. What did i ever do to you, you Microsoft Developers 😔. Why you do this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel so empty.

I can't keep up with what is being teached to us in the mathematical courses. Everything else is fine. "Algorithm and data structures" aka Info A (Programming in C++) and "Computer engineering" aka Info C (details of how a CPU, RAM etc. works) is understandable, but when it comes to math I, completely, am lost.

2-4 hours drive to university and 2-4 hours drive back to my home each day. Two oral examinations each week in Info A and Info C. Three assignments in Info A, Info C and math.

I was so naive to believe that I would be more free and have more free time as a student haha.

Maybe I should switch to a university of applied sciences. The classical university is too theoretical for me, but in the same time I know that I can't keep up with the time when I have to build a circuit in the university of applied sciences.

I am able to design and build a circuit, but I am slow. Probably because I am checking many times if I did it properly before testing it.

To my fellow German devRanters who have studied or tried to study: You all just read my situation and my thoughts. Am I wrong about what I am thinking about a university of applied sciences? How are the mathematical courses there in terms of difficulty?

If mathematics is at the same difficulty, I will try to do something else that has nothing to do with college. It just won't get into my brain.

I was checking out this wk139 rants & thinking to myself how does one have a dev enemy.. o.O Well TIL that maaaaybe I have one too..

Not sure if ex coworker was a bit 'weird & unskillful' or wanted to intentionally harm us and thank god failed miserably..

I decided to finally cleanup his workspace today: he had a bad habit of having almost all files in solution checked out to himself, most of them containing no changes whatsoever... I reminded him on many occasions that this is bad practice & to only have checked out files he was currently working on. And never checkin files without changes.. Ofc didn't listen.. managed to checkin over 100 files one time, most of which had no changes & some even had alerts for debugging in them.. which ofc made it to the client server.. :/

On one or two occasions I already logged in and wanted to check if files have any real changes that I'd actually want to keep, but gave up after 40 or so files in a batch that were either same or full of sh..

Anyhow today I decided I will discard everything, as the codebase changed a lot since he left an I know I already fixed a lot of his tasks.. I logged in, did the undo pending changes and then proceed to open source control explorer.

While I was cleaning up his workspace, I figured I could test what will happen if I request changeset xy and shelveset yy, will it be ok, or do I have to modify something else & merge code.. Figured using his workspace that was already set up for testing would be easier, faster & less 'stressful' than creating another one on my computer, change IIS settings and all just, to test this merge..

Boy was I wrong.. upon opening source control explorer, I was greeted by a lot of little red Xes staring back at me... more than half the folders on TFS were marked for deletion.. o.O

Now I'm not sure if he wanted to fuck me up when he left or was just 'stupid' when it comes to TFS. O.O

So...maybe I do have a dev enemy after all.. or I don't.. Can't decide.. all I know for sure is tomorrow I'm creating another workspace to test this and I'm not touching his computer ever again.. O.O

How lawyers fuck up technology!

I rented a car today, given that I don't want to go by train currently. That was some VW Golf, and it had a lane assist which can't decide whether to be helpful or obnoxious:

Either I kept the steering wheel and still steered myself, in which case the lane assist's actions made the steering feel somewhat wobbly. Initially, I suspected a worn out control arm bearing, but that's a long term damage in aging cars, not in new ones.

Or I just rested my hands on my upper legs, as I usually do (palms facing upwards and holding the wheel lightly), then the lane assist worked by itself. It was even smart enough to deactivate itself upon blinking before changing lanes.

However, it complained after about 15 seconds that I didn't steer. I said, shut up and do your job. The warning intensified, and I said, fuck you. Then it initiated some stutter braking to wake me up. Annoying like a reincarnation of Clippy.

I ended up giving the steering wheel a slight tip to the right every 15, 20 seconds just to let the lane assist know I was still there, relying on the lane assist to correct it again. On a long trip, I would have had to deactivate that crap.

Obviously, the VW engineers did their job, but the legal department feared law suits should anything go wrong and ruined the feature!

What was also annoying is that there is no real hand brake anymore in many modern cars. Sucks when pulling off against a hill. Plus that at red traffic lights, I usually put the gear out (manual transmission) and pull the hand brake instead of keeping my foot on the clutch. That's not the same with this pseudo hand brake!

(In case you wonder why anyone would do that:
it's an anachronism that avoids lengthening the clutch wires, decades after cars switched to hydraulics.)

fck you visual studio!!! seriously what is wrong with you?!?
~me peacfully writing some code ~
ok let's see what we did
vs: I can't compile that. The key whateverKey in line 15 is not defined.
me: ok let's investigate...
nowhere in line 15 use whateverKey.... ok....
wait I didn't change that file at all.
~me clicking rebuild solution~
vs: can't build that because of whateverKey in line 15.
me : WTF?!?
checking git diff -> file not changed
me okkkkkkk......
closing visual studio and reopening solution.
Build succeeded.
What the actuall hell?!?
I'm spending way too much time trying to get that shity peace of software to do what it is supposed to do!

It took me 5!!!! fucking hours to do it but I did.

I got linux to work with my RTX 2070 oh my god

Most of that time was spent figuring out what exactly was wrong because the problem is hella common but the cause doesn’t seem to be so i was sent off in the completely wrong direction a bunch of times

Apparently Nouveau doesn’t support my GPU yet and installing the binary driver from nvidia seemed impossible but i pulled it off thanks to some random stranger on askubuntu.com

Unfortunately i got it working on elementary os instead of ubuntu so now i have to go install ubuntu 🤷‍♂️

i submitted my first app to the app store yesterday. i built it with flutter, and it's already on the play store.

for some reason - i probably created the app wrong - the app store connect/portal needed screenshots of my app running on an ipad pro. now i don't have an ipad pro, and i can't use an emulator because i don't have a mac for that matter (i have been using codemagic.io for builds). i called friends - they don't have any ipads.

what did i do?

i turned my phone sideways and scaled it to the ipad pro resolution.

it is currently "in review"

🙏let's hope this works