Me: Alright, let's code!

School: Psst. Hey.

Me: What?

School: Remember that assignment from last week?

Me: Oh god please no.

School: Yeah, it's tomorrow. And you have a Geography exam next Monday. You love geography, right?

Me: Please, no, I want to become a programmer, not a--

School: Shush... It's okay. Programming can wait. You want a to get a job, right? What would they say when they see your poor Geography?

Me: That doesn't even... Okay, fine, I'll do it...

* two days later *

Me: Fuck me! Finally! Let's do some coding now.

School: Psst. Hey.

Friend sees me learning React js.

Friend: "Why are you always studying? Your exams are over and you already have a job."

Me: "Because I don't know it and it looks interesting?"

Friend: "What a waste of time..."

I try to upskill myself and friend gives me shit.

He's the type of guy that would watch a 5min YouTube video on a topic and suddenly become an expert in it.

I believe that a day without new knowledge is a waste of a day.

Dont know if that's normal or I'm just weird. But I still stand by it.

So my manager (a 29 y/o, who hardly can use a mac) walks towards me with a hint of panic in his eyes.

Manager: Hey commander keen, do you know how to use vertical look up in excel, I've tried, and looked at tutorials.

Me: yeah I really don't know excel (and not willing to learn, especially on the fly), I don't even have excel installed, I can write I script that does what you want.

Manager: No you have enough on your plate

3 hours later

Manager: hey I still can't figure it out, could you solve it with a script, won't that take to long

Me: no send me the files, Ill do it with a script.

I start writing 2 for loops and wait for the file, 10 ish minutes later its basicly done, just need to put in the column indexes.

I send a message on both slack channels (hey are you going to email or slack me the file)

After a hour I walk to his desk and again ask him for the file.

Manager a good 2 hours later on slack: Hey I just send you the file, I hope its not to much work, it has to happen asap.

So if you have kids, and they are not that bright by some kind of birth defect, don't worry, they can always become a manager.

But you can't get me down today. I hit 2000 upvotes and the employer is unknowingly a proud sponsor for reading and writing all these rants and comments :-) thnx devrant

Boss: make this thing
Me: yeah no worries. Where is the spec?
Boss: We don't have enough one but we outsourced the design so call him

Designer: haven't started yet
Me: excellent

Boss: I'm going on holiday. I'll leave this to you.
Me: erm ok. I'm having a few problems getting stuff out of the designer though.

*2 weeks later and still no designs*

Boss: I'm back. Where is the progress?!
Me: indeed.

*1 week later i get half designs that sort of make sense*

Boss: hurry up!

*1 week later*

Me: designer you're busting my balls here
Designer: yeah lol

Me to boss: still having problems. No idea what I'm doing.
Boss: deal with it

*2 days later*
PM: we are demoing it to clients tomorrow
Me: brilliant. I'll become a magician then.

* Meeting goes well and no one notices the thing is a bit buggy*

*2 days later*
Me to boss and pm: you already know whats going on but I'll keep trying.
Boss: ok it's just a proof of concept anyway.
Designer: yeah here's the rest of the designs lol

*1 week later, the designs made no sense, no idea what they wanted but hey it's a proof of concept so I'll just do my best...*

*suddenly again, hey you have 1 week before we sell it. Lol. smashes a product together as fast as humanly possible, due to half designs and no time to do it right even html classes and CSS aren't right - didn't know things would be repeated at the time. No time to fix entire thing. Luckily just a proof of concept*

New senior developer: hey boss just said this is being sold tomorrow.
Me: wtf..It's a proof of concept and i was given longer...
New senior developer: no
Me: :(

Senior developer and all colleagues: it's full of bugs and doesn't work
Me: yes that will happen without specs, random tight deadlines, no designs that made sense and a total of about a week and a half to make an entire system for multiple user types to make applications, send messages, post jobs, handle all paperwork and move paperwork among different user types as they go through applications. I told everyone what was going on but i get no support...

*Silence*

Boss: wtf i gave you so long! All i know is my entire staff is working on a product that should be done ages ago
Me: ok, however i have said almost every day i need-
Boss: I'm not interested

*I finish my placement year and never get any promised work or the job offer*

Seems legit?

Tldr :
Office Building : 1
Population: 5000
Number of PC users: 5000
No of Spare mice: 0

Day 1:
Training period commences.
My mouse laser sensor doesn't work.

Solution: Use this mouse to log in to your system.
Open the company portal.
Connect to vpn.
Enter username password.
Create a ticket for mouse replacement.
Done.

Day 3
I bring my own mouse.
Confiscated at security.
Becomes a security violation.

Day 9
I get a call from helpdesk.
Agent- what is the problem?
Me- my mouse is not working.
Agent- why?
Me- what do you mean? Something is wrong with the sensor.
Agent- clean the sensor.
Disconnects call.
Marks ticket as resolved.
Me- WTF just happened!

Naturally, I escalate the issue.

Day 15
Level 2 Agent- what happened? Why have you escalated the issue?
Me- I need a mouse, waiting since 2 weeks.
Him- No mouse is available
Me- you don't have a single spare mouse available in an office with 5000 PC users?
Him- no they're out of stock.
Me- when will it be back in stock?
Him- we will 'soon' launch a tender for quotations from sellers.
Me- time?
Him- 1 week.

Day 34

I email the head of supplies for the city office. Next day I get a used super small mouse, which doesn't have a left button. Anyways, I've given up hope now.

Day 45
I become a master at keyboard shortcuts.
Finish my training.
Get transferred to another city.
No mouse till date.

Surprisingly, this was one of the top recruiters in my country. Never knew, MNCs can be so so inefficient for such simple tasks.
Start-ups are way better in this regard. Latest tech, small community, minimal bureaucracy and a lot of respect and things to learn.

Never let anyone make you believe that just because you don't have a specific skill which is 'required' for your dream job/a job you really want, you won't be able to reach it.

I've heard countless times that I could never do anything with programming/linux (server) engineering because I'm freaking bad at maths. They always said it was a requirement to understand it in order to become good at those two things.

Except for a few simple tests with 'okay' marks, I never got a good grade for it and failed it entirely at every school.

Guess who's a programmer (free time) and a professional linuxer right now!

It just pisses me off when people tell someone that because they don't possess a skill, they won't be able to make it to what they would love to do.

I'm a little late to this, but that Python master/slave issue.. what the fuck is up with that?!

You say that you're offended by words.
=> Fuck off. If you want to serve social justice, help people in third-world countries that need your help.
=> Also, you do realize that the use of master/slave is just as much applicable to technology as client/server or host/guest are, right? It's a relationship between fucking machines or code blocks, not humans.

You say "why the outrage over this?"
=> Fuck off. Your SJW bullshit has no place in technology. It's a fucking word in fucking code!!!

You say that you're improving the Python project with this.
=> Fuck off. It breaks existing documentation and needlessly abstracts terminology that is used pretty much everywhere. What do you prefer, conciseness and a language to be easy to understand or for it to become all cushioned to soothe your frail feelings?

You know, there's something else that I wanted to talk about that's related to this. I have Asperger Syndrome, which on paper is a disability. In practice it's difficulty to socialize while having an above average IQ. That "disability" is what drove me into technology. When I see job listings actively prefer people with disabilities for social justice, you know what? That offends ME. Because I wouldn't want to be chosen as the best applicant just because it ticks social justice boxes. I want to be chosen as the best applicant because I outcompeted every other applicant with actual skill and fitness to do my job.

Also, when a company sells you a defective unit, would you be happy? Of course not. So why are you happy when they employ a defective? I am someone that would - on paper - be impeded by natural selection, because I am "handicapped". But I'm all for it. Humanity is what it is today - shit - partly because defectives have become widely accepted into society. Call me a bigot, but I'd rather be called that than to not raise concerns about this trend.

On the subject of handicaps, that's a term that's used in games, what for aiding the player that can't win against the regular opponent (which is usually just a fucking bot, wtf yo). I am handicapped, therefore YOU shouldn't use the word in a sense where it's totally reasonable to use it!! Says no one ever, me neither. Grow a fucking pair and realize that code isn't written with the intent to offend anyone. So why are you?

1. I join a company.

2. I get deeply involved in "how to run the company", and get nice compliments from both coworkers & management about my skills in conveying startup/scaleup advice & necessities to upper management.

3. With my ego inflated through all the sweet talk, I think "ah, what the hell, let's do this again", and I accept a Lead/CTO promotion. I have to join board meetings, write reports on quarterly plans and progress.

4. I get unhappy/stressed/burned-out because I really just want to be a developer, not a manager/executive.

5. Upper management understands, I give up my lead position, lock myself back into my coding cave.

6. I get annoyed because the requirements I receive become more and more disconnected from reality, half of the teams seem to have decided to stop using agile/scrum, the testing pipeline breaks all the time, I get an updated labor contract from HR by mail which smells like charred flesh, etc

7. The annoyances become too much to do ANY work. I yell at the other devs outside of the entrance of my cave. There is no answer, only a few painful moans and sighs.

8. I emerge from my cave. The city has turned into a desolate wasteland. The office is a burning ruin, the air sharp and heavy with black soot. Disemboweled corpses of developers litter the poisoned soil.

Product Managers dressed in stained ripped suits scream at each other while they try to reinforce concrete barricades with scotch tape and post-its. *THUMP* Something enormous is trying to break through. "Thank God, bittersweet, you're still alive! The stakeholders! They have mutated! We couldn't meet the promised deadlines! We've lost the whole mobile app department, and that kid there is the last of the backenders and he's only an intern! You're here to save us, right? RIGHT?".

In the corner, between the overflowing coffee machine and a withered cactus, a young boy has collapsed onto the floor. His face is covered in moldy coffee grounds, clasping on to his closed macbook for dear life, wide-open eyes staring into the void, mumbling: "didn't backup the database, and It's all gone" over and over.

A severely dented black Tesla with a dragging loose bumper breaks through the dried up vertical herb garden and the smoothiebar, and comes to a halt against the beanbags in a big cloud of styrofoam balls.

The CEO limps out, leaking blood all over the upholstery. He yells to the COO: "The datacenter is completely flooded with sewage! I saved the backup tapes though", holding a large nest of tangled black magnetic tape mixed with clumps of mud above his head.

9. I collect my outstanding salary and sell any rewarded options/shares for a low dumping price, take a 5 month holiday, and ask a recruiter about opportunities in a different city.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WhatsApp, freaking WhatsApp.
How did this thing become such a standard. How? Why does everyone EXPECT you to have it. They assume that you have it installed on your phone.

'Why don't you respond to my messages? '

'Which messages? '

'The ones I sent you'

'I didn't get any messages. Wait, how did you send them to me? '

'WhatsApp'

'Ah, yeah I don't use that. Wait, where did you even get my phone number from? '

'What? You don't have WhatsApp? Freaking weirdo. '

'bye'

How did an app(lication) become such a standard and why does everyone automatically assume that you have it? And whenever I explain them why I don't use it (Facebook = bad), they just react with 'install it again' (most ridiculous answer) or 'what is wrong with you' or they just give me a confused look and walk away.

A lot of them also act like there were no alternatives (some even better than whatsapp). One of them and probably also the best one is signal. It has all the necessary features a messaging app needs and is also very secure.

Luckily a few of my friends have installed signal and I am currently trying my best at my parents. They have threatened to 'take my phone away if I don't install WhatsApp again' or 'if you don't use WhatsApp then you also don't need a phone'.

Okay finale:

Fuck whatsapp, fuck facebook, fuck ignorance

Story time.

Not sure it counts as data loss, more temporary corruption (and in my own brain).

> be me.
> be clinically depressed
> be recently out of an awful breakup
> recently nearly committed suicide by train
> be bored and lonely one night
> take lsd
> feel fine
> go to McDonald’s
> feel fine
> while eating question the nature of reality
> become convinced I’m an observer of a cosmic story and cannot die
> go outside in only jeans
> run in traffic at 1AM to prove my point
> don’t die
> run around the streets more sure of my new reality than I’d ever been of anything
> feel free and no longer sad
> walk around observing the world
> sit on wall and wonder why the story had the structure I was observing
> fall off wall into grass and mud
> follow cute guy into apartment building
> follow into lift
> ask what everything means
> spend better part of couple hours in lift pressing emergency button asking for help
> get no response
> scare poor Russian lady that gets into lift and finds an overweight topless man on the floor babbling incoherently
> ride to top floor
> get out
> sit on leather chair in corridor
> feelsnice.tiff
> decide I’m actualising my desires and reality
> don’t realise this is just the trip wearing off and consciousness exerting more control
> walk into random apartment (door is unlocked because why wouldn’t it be for the god that I believe I am at this point)
> explore
> gorgeous apartment
> realise it’s a family apartment from clothes in hallway and items
> find bathroom
> decide I want a bubble bath
> run bubble bath
> can’t work out how to drain water. Bath now full of twigs and mud #sorry
> decide that I’d like to go home, or onto my next adventure. Hopefully the seaside as I’m now realising I have more control.
> open bathroom door
> not the seaside. Ah well. Try to walk home
> walk home wrapped in fluffy towel from nice family’s apartment
> get home
> realise what had happened
> throw remaining drugs away
> sit and rock in utter paranoia and guilt for hours until flatmate wakes up.

MFW first bad trip ever.
MFW I wonder whether that family knew I was there and were scared / discovered the mess in the bathroom the next morning and not knowing which is worse.

MFW I still have the towel because it’s fluffy AF.

The moral of the story kids, is that when it comes to the OS rattling around in your brain, installing a virus that is sensitive to what apps you have running is a bad idea when those apps make the virus go to fucking town.

Terrible analogy I know, but fuck it.

So our company hired a new COO few months ago, and he oversees digital department as well

recently he called the digital department into his office to talk about a new campaign for a client, and client's mascot is a ladybug, so he goes like this

COO: So i was thinking, we need to make people more aware about the new branch opening

COO: I have a creative / innovative idea, we probably can get an award for this and I'm sure client will be really impressed with this. Why don't we put ladybug​s on Google homepage, just walking around flapping their wings and stuff, i mean everyone visits Google right ?

Our Team: awkwardly looking at each other
Me: 😐😐😐😐
( I was confused what to think )

Then our designer calmly explained him why it wouldn't work while we were trying our best not to laugh

how the fuck someone like him manage to stay alive all these years and become a COO, i mean he doesn't have to know it all but damn this is common sense

I was very troubled as a teenager. I had some pretty intense family issues that led me to smoking cigarettes at 12, marijuana at 13, and drinking everyday at 15. By 17, I was using other "party favors", as we called them, on an every day basis. I left high school at the beginning of my final year, about a week before I turned 18, moved out of my family's home and started working three different part time jobs.
This was the lowest point of my life. I've never felt so much like a fuck-up and loser than back in those days. I hated myself, hated what I had become, hated everything I did. Hate hate hate. I spent a year like this, pitying myself, seeking sympathy from people when I shouldnt have been, basically seeking out someone who would tell me that I wasnt so awful.
That never happened. I only deepened the hole that I had dug for myself.

Then I got angry. I thought it wasn't fair that everyone else was enjoying life except for me. I wanted to find a passion. I wanted to find excitement again. I wanted to look forward to something else besides going back to bed.
When I turned 19, I decided that I was going to take control of my life because I was so angry with my position at the time.
I put myelf into college. I made myself stay awake and focus on schoolwork and internal improvement. I started facing my flaws and defects head-on and conquering them rather than letting them eat me from the inside out.

Now, I am only a couple months away from turning 21.
I rarely drink now. I quit smoking cigarettes after almost 9 years.
I graduate this December, and enroll into my next degree program in January.
Today, I signed employment paperwork with the company I interned at over the summer. I am now a full-time DevOps Engineer with salary, bonuses, 401k, and full health coverage.
My boyfriend and I just moved into our own house that we are renting together. No more needing shitty roommates.
I have most of the debt that my mother left in my name paid off.

A couple of years ago, I couldn't have cared less about my life or how I turned out. I truly expected to get arrested, wind up homeless, or just flat-out end up dead.
I never thought I would see myself where I am today.
I am extremely proud of myself for turning my future around. I know some of you may read this and think I'm an idiot, or that this seems trivial because I am so young. Thats okay.
I have learned that hard work always pays off, and that sometimes you must sacrifice what is expedient to gain what is meaningful.

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.

I worked in the same building as another division in my organization, and they found out I had created a website for my group. They said, “We have this database that was never finished. Do you think you could fix it?”

I asked, “What was it developed in?”
He replied, “Well what do you know?”
I said, “LAMP stack: PHP, MySQL, etc.” [this was over a decade ago]

He excitedly exclaimed, “Yeah, that’s it! It’s that S-Q-L stuff.”

I’m a little nervous at this point but I was younger than 20 with no degree, entirely self-taught from a book, and figured I’d check it out - no actual job offer here yet or anything.

They logged me on to a Windows 2000 Server and I become aware it’s a web application written in VB / ASP.NET 2.0 with a SQL Server backend. But most of the fixes they wanted were aesthetic (spelling errors in aspx pages, etc.) so I proceeded to fix those. They hired me on the spot and asked when I could start. I was a wizard to them and most of what they needed was quite simple (at first). I kept my mouth shut and immediately went to a bookstore after work that day and bought an ASP.NET book.

I worked there several years and ended up rewriting that app in C# and upgrading the server and ASP.NET framework, etc. It stored passwords in plaintext when I started and much more horrific stuff. It was in much better shape when I left.

That job was pivotal in my career and set the stage for me to be where I am today. I got the job because I used the word “SQL” in a sentence.

You know what? Fuck this shit. We spend most of our life locked down in a school, we are being told facts, tested and stressed for many years with the only hope to get out as soon as possible.
Failing is something that keeps you there indefinitely.
Parents keep pushing on kids to achieve the best and get good grades to have a job.
Then something happens.
You get out of school and what happens?
You start working.
A.k.a modern slavery...
Employers thinks that since you are young they are doing YOU a favor if they decided to hire you.
So you find yourself having to do the same tasks everyone is doing, perhaps you are even fully capable of managing them and get the shit done but guess what!!
You are paid the minimum.
You barely make enough to pay off your rent which keeps you locked away from Holidays abroad, from that huge cake you desperately want.
And guess what! Try to raise your voice and you'll get fired in a Matter of seconds, replaced with someone else which accepts any condition.
You dream of a house, a family and a car but you can't even eat healthy with that salary.
So you are forced to buy cheap and low quality food from the same store again and again till you had enough and spend some days with that horrible feeling...
Calling you to get a job interview feels like they are doing you a favor, they always try to give the minimum possible and expect you to work in a serious manner and respect their deadlines.
Colleagues earn a lot more even though they aren't doing anything different from you.
For the first year you won't have any holiday, let alone traveling or anything different from just staying home for 3 days straight.

Banks won't give you a loan because your job doesn't pay off
The day that your car is broken you struggle to eat the whole month.

On top of that, taxes. Because they aren't taking away enough.

I don't want to live this life, I don't want to become a modern slave and work 8-17 everyday for the rest of my life and retire with a shitty retirement pension that won't probably grant me anything again.

I had enough of this shit.
I don't want to go back to work and pretend to do what I am supposed to do with a smile on my face knowing that I am just a number and that no matter how skilled I am I can always get replaced with N number of people for a lower salary of mine.

I am tired
I dream of a life that I won't ever reach this way.

Today I looked up houses prices and felt like shit.
I will never in my entire life be able to afford something so expensive, let alone buying furnitures and what is needed or what I like.

I dream of having my place, my dog and my family but apparently I am asking too much.

How is this even fair in 2018/2019?

I... I am... Speechless.
I wonder how many people out there are in the same situation or even worse and I can't even wrap my mind around that.

This is just modern slavery.

My boss makes a shit load of money from young people that can't complain because they are threatened and will eventually be replaced...

This is my rant.

- just do your job. Close this ticket already and go to the next one

- It's just a 1 minute job.. Don't build scripts for things that simple!

- Look, we don't have time to spare for coffee breaks. Stop wasting your time on scripting!

- netikras, the IST shift fucked things up again. I need you to do your magic and clear those alerts

- netikras, there are 20 tickets waiting to be investigated. Either your coleagues spend 2 hours on them or you do your magic in 2 minutes, as always..

- netikras, please share your scripts with your team

- netikras, I have nominated you for the Star Award for your script

- netikras, here's the star award and the financial prize. Those are nice swarovskies you've picked for your wife! Good choice!

- Since our team has lots of spare time now, I urge you all to attend X, Y and Z trainings. Trainings and Certification expenses are covered

A very similar scenario has just happened in 2 last workplaces of mine. In both cases I was the one to build the script despite my management's requests to stop wasting time and resources on them.

When I see what is wrong and take some actions to right those wrongs, when superiors build roadblocks for me claiming it's not worth it and in the end I still build my solutions and become the most efficient person/team in the whole department -- that right there is what boosts my ego to the sky and above!! It proves I am actually on the right track. It proves that I in fact have a better understanding than those who should have it.

It just makes me tick!

Looking for another adventure like that :) With more power to change things this time

On being a woman in tech...

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

Here's an example from this weekend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear children let's talk about how to ask a f***ing question.

You don't just go "I need help. I can't figure it out." We had trainings on this, I sat through 3 hours holding your hand to help you try and understand things.

And yet now we have scheduled another 3 hours to help you figure this out because you said you were having difficulty with it because you couldn't figure it out. How about instead of just saying you "Need help", you start by
1. Explaining what you are trying to accomplish
2. What specific issue are you facing? Is there an error message or something?
3. What have you already tried thus far that didn't work?

Instead of "I NEED HELP I CAN'T FIGURE IT OUT!" that is the sign of a lazy f****ing engineer, someone who doesn't want to think, who doesn't want to learn something new who wants to just coast by. Especially when this is going to become an increasingly important part of your job.

And of course you currently are still a whole job level above me because sitting around and keeping a chair warm for 10 years means you are a valuable contributor, instead of what you can actually DO!

This bugs me so much. So remember kids, when you need help, or need to ask a question, ASK IT THE RIGHT F****ING WAY!

Do you have a spare usb phone cable?
I have but I'm using it to charge my phone

Do you have a spare laser pointer for my presentation?
Sorry, I don't

Do you have a spare mouse?
No :)

Sometimes things become a little weird

Do you have a spare keyboard?
No sorry. :/

Do you have a spare monitor?
:/

Do you have a spare computer?
what?

Do you have a spare mac?
>:(

Do you have two spare computers and one printer for each? Would be nice for the conference that we are going to hold tomorrow if someone need to print.
What's wrong with you people. I'm just a developer, not a fucking warehouse

Every single one of them, and every one that will come after them.

Google, it started out as 2 people in their garage, wanting to make a search engine that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

Microsoft, it started out with Bill Gates - young high school computer nerd - who wanted to make an operating system for the world to use. Something that's better than the competition. And boy did he do so. Well "better than the competition" aside, he did make it for the world to use. And the world adopted it. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

See where I'm going here?

Apple, it started out with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, just like Google did, wanting to make hardware that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just to make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. Planned obsolescence has been baked into it, just like it is in every other piece of technology. Quality control and thinking through the design has become a thing of the past. User choice, yeah who cares about that.

Samsung, it started out centuries ago actually, and I don't really remember the details of it.. ColdFusion has a video on it if memory serves me right. Do watch it if you're interested. Anyway, just like all the others they started out as a company which wanted to make the world a little bit better. And damn right did they do so.. initially. Look what they've become now. Forcing their stupid TouchWiz UI upon their customers (or products?), a Bixby button that can't even be reprogrammed.. and the latest thing.. Knox, advertised as a security feature, but as everyone who likes rooting their devices and mucking with it knows, it is an anti-feature that only serves for lockdown. Why shouldn't you be able to turn in a phone for RMA when a hardware error occurs, when all you've personally modified is the software? Why should changing the software blow that eFuse, so that you can be sure that you can't replace it without specialized equipment and a very steady hand?

I could go on and on forever about more of the tech giants out there, but I feel like this suffices for now. Otherwise I won't have anything else left for future rants! But one thing I know for sure. Every tech company started, starts, and will start out with a desire to make the world a better place, and once they gain a significant customer base, they will without exception turn into the same kind of Evil Megacorp., just like the ones before them. Some may say that capitalism itself is to blame for this, the greed for more when you already have a lot. Who knows? I'd rather say that the very human nature itself is to blame for it. We're by design greedy beings, and I hate it. I hate being human for that. I don't want humans to be evil towards one another, and be greedy for ever more. But I guess that that's just the way it is, and some things do actually never change...

It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.

It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.

The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.

I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.

Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.

I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.

And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."

It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.

I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.

If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.

(sorry if someone's already shared this)
Very true though. I remember very clearly when I was around 10 years old, wondering what all these random symbols on a keyboard were for and what type of person would use them.

I guess I'm that type of person; never would have guessed at the time that my fascination with technology would lead to where I am now.

Anyone here have a cool story to share about why they decided to become a developer?

So I'm a entry level female Developer and I started a contract to hire position in July. Its my first job as a developer and I love almost everything about it. Except this..., there is a Senior Female Developer on my team who hates me and isn't shy about it. She goes for the throat man! She magnifies any mistake I make, hell she calls me out on things that people would consider positive. In sprint planning this week she got mad at me for pulling tasks from the backlog after finishing mine early. I've tried to do everything I could to make her like me. I patiently listen when she goes on and on about her damn cats, kids, sports, ah everything, and she is a non stop talker.

Her main problem with me, so she tells the head of engineering, is that I bug her too much. I almost laughed when I heard this was her main issue with me! Sure, I asked her the normal amount of newbie questions but it's not like I don't know how to read code or google! In fact I started avoiding talking to her about a month ago because she was so rude to me. Now getting hired on full time comes down to whether or not she can stand me still if I am working on another team. I'm so frustrated because it's impossible to prove my worth to this company with this crazy lady making me look bad. I have no problems with anyone else at work. In fact a lot of us have become good friends. No one understands why she hates me so much. It feels like middle school all over again.

On top of that there is an even newer hire who she is supposed to help bring on to the team, but because of her horrible management skills, I have become his defecto mentor for learning the project, as well as the technologies we use. The stress of being in an uncertain contract to hire position + tyrant coworker + helping the new guy + still learning and having my own work to do has been overwhelming! I don't know what to do other than hope that she doesn't try to sabotage me moving to a new team.

Motherfucking WordPress coupled with motherfucking sales people.

If you promise the client something, please fucking relay it via the correct process (i.e the fucking ticketing system that took me a month to write for the company - it's seriously just a click away on your desktop.). "I told your boss" is not a fucking apt excuse.

My boss forgets, and well, doesn't give a fuck about procedure either.

Now you phone my boss and he phones me, on a fucking Sunday evening, telling me that the client was promised a website by tomorrow morning at 10AM. You tell me this at fucking 9PM.

Why didn't you tell me earlier? How the fuck am I supposed to shit out something I would be proud of in a few hours? Nevermind me fucking up my sleeping routine; how the fuck?

Conversation went like this:
"xyz was promised this site by sales person fuckTwit, I need this live by Monday morning. I have sent you a few images. Make it in WordPress, client says they want a 'tangy looking theme'.

Me: it's a bit unrealistic requesting this, is there no way we can extend the time so I have time to create this?
Also, what do you mean by 'tangy'?

Boss: don't know. Make it happen. No excuses.

What the fuck is a tangy theme? When I become a webDev at the company? More importantly, fucking WordPress?!

Now I'm sitting on this shit, tired as a manatee in mating season, and using goddamn WordPress.

I have to halt my irritation, because I get severely irritated when I'm tired, I have to restrain myself from telling the involved parties tomorrow to install the FuckYourself WordPress plugin, coupled with a resignation letter.

Same sales person got me in shit a while ago, because I refused to give him access to the network to download fucking cartoons. Sales director went and moaned that his bitch (the sales person) needs this for a presentation. Yeah fucking right.
Go Snorkelling in a sewer truck you egotistic, megalomaniacal, indecent, outrageous, horrible motherfucker of a person.

Time to develop a fucking website with, oh, a company profile pamphlet.

Times like this I keep telling myself, "my time will come, my time will come".

PRO LIFE SAVING TIPS FOR DEVS (long rant, not clickbait 😝)

I have a medical condition called DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis). It clots blood in veins near lower body parts. Affected leg swells and become red and it is very painful. It happens when you very frequently sit for very long.

I used to play games, code and stuffs for hours and sometimes I used to stay at home without taking decent walk for weeks. I am only 18 and did not see it coming. But its really early stage and I might be fully recovered real soon.

This condition is not rare and happens to millions of people every year. And it can be avoided if you avoid sitting at computers for long hours and take 5 mins to walk or stretch. Even if you can avoid this condition, there are many others if you dont pay attention on your body. Please take some time to google how you can avoid anything such.

(Please don't comment sympathies, I really know you wish well for me. Instead you can throw tips what you do to relax after long hours of work).

Mom: Hey, my computer is doing weird stuff again, you know what that means?
Me: *I should have become lawyer instead of IT*
Mom: And the microwave makes a beeping sound. Fix it.

Our division lead's second in command offered to help me white board and get promoted.

This dude is one of my major role models. He would become my boss instead of the sexist, backwards tyrant of a bastard that I currently report to.

I asked him a question and wound up being told to join their study group and to let him know what I need help with in terms of resume, etc.

There are a few lights at the end of this hell hole of a tunnel. I have a few other options, too.

So I'm on stack overflow trying to give back to the community that has helped me so much yanno.

So I see a question and decide to answer it but I'm on my mobile and trying to write a well formatted etc. answer is a bit tricky so instead I thought I would answer it as best I could on the phone so at least the OP would be going in the right direction and then when I got back to my computer, I would expand on the answer.

But before I had a chance (within 10 minutes of answering) some 200k+ rep dickhead decided it was his job to tell me how bad I was for not giving a proper answer and i have enough rep to comment and I should know better.

So I responded to him (my first mistake) and told him that my answer was intended to get him going and most likely he wouldn't need any more help but that I was going to update it when I got back to my computer.

Well he didn't like that and continued to berate me for my unbelievable behavior.

I then said that if he was that upset, then report me, or even better how about he actually answer the question instead of being a fuckwit to others that have tried.

I also said that I thought that SO and development in general was not about being given the answer but by finding it yourself and actually learning something and that sometimes you need to be pushed it the right direction to find the answer which is what I did here.

Well he disagreed with that too and downvoted my answer which by that point had been updated (like I said I would).

I just don't get it, what is wrong with these people and why has SO become such a toxic place?

I want to give back to the community and help others like people have done for me over the years, but then fuckheads like this just ruin it and make you not want to be a part of it anymore.

Then I come here to devRant and everyone is so nice to each other, you can see the respect.

About a year ago, while giving interview for a pharmaceutical company. (role of software developer)
Interviewer : So why do you want to join X?
Me (in mind) : (Ok, be calm, I have practiced this and i know what to answer, just follo tbe script)

Me : (Following the script) I would like to join X because I think X could give me exposure to meet people with various skills. (Cant remember what was next) And i also think working in X would make my father proud as he always wanted me to become a Doctor.
After that I just sat there for a few seconds staring at desk contemplating my life failures and I suddenly remember Im in a INTERVIEW.
Me : And thats it. (smiling as if nothing happened)
Worst Interview ever.

#First

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call me old-fashioned, but... I kinda liked it back in the day, when Microsoft made proprietary software, the Community made free software and everyone's "cui bono" was quite easy to answer - even those corporations involved in FLOSS did have a clear way to finance themselves.

Now, we have Microsoft coming into open source, seemingly making projects better and offering more and more "free" stuff.

You know.

"Free" Windows 10.
"Free" SaaS Office.
"Free" "Private" Repos on Github.

In general - what happened to clear and concise "I give you money, you give me stuff" capitalism like we had it in the 2000s?

I'd rather pay 20 bucks for a game on Steam than get it "free" and with ads or microtransactions - yet, many games, especially mobile, don't even offer me that option. It wouldn't be that hard now, would it?

The same goes for software. That Canonical would need to fuck their users over after Ubuntu One went to shit was obvious - they didn't offer the kind of commercial/enterprise OS'es that Redhat or SuSE sell.

What people seem to forget is that everyone needs to make a profit somehow. You don't get "free" stuff. Even the volunteers in the Open Source Community get something out of it - an opportunity to pad their CV at least, if nothing else.

Nowadays, software manufacturers have the same legitimacy as the "free" financial "advisors" you find at banks - and who could be dumb enough to trust them? Oh yeah: Almost the entire fucking society is who.

But then again, sell something and noone will want it - because they all want it for free, with annoying, privacy-invading ads or with equally annoying microtransactions, or financing based on commission - so you don't only pay ONCE, you pay until you realize you got fucked over and quit.

Capitalism used to work until all those idiots stepped in. How the fuck don't people realize that there's no free lunch in life? When have we stopped being functional people and turned into idiots.

Even worse: Those idiots think that they're entitled to something! They, who volunteered to become merchandise instead of customers, think that they have rights! Do cattle have rights? Nope. They get their "free" hay everyday and I get to buy beef, that's how it works. Moo!

Hell, they are surprised when they get fucked over by bank salespeople or their data stolen by corporations, intelligence agencies or something... What did they expect, goodwill?

Can we please make Adam Smith mandatory reading in school?! I mean, give people a chance to understand capitalism? The nonexistent "goodwill" of traders in general?

Startup.

Our intern is a weird bird. He is an immigrant (like me) and should be working his ass of to become an FT, and then tie the H1B. I never had an opportunity like this.

Instead the dude sat on his hands for four/five months since hired. He was managed remotely and fairly low touch. He was doing some light support work initially, though I had not heard anything from him.

I take him on now as his ass is about to get dropped. Manage him much more directly (small tasks several checking per day, you get the picture). We need to deliver something relatively simple in three weeks.

On Thursday I find out that the dude has no idea of what Spring is (we are a Java shop). Dude, you have had access to our fucking code base for five months, didn't it cross your mind to poke in? Maybe do a little research and see what this thing is that we are using ALL OVER THE FUCKING PLACE? I sit two desks from you, why the fuck didn't you ask me a question? This ain't fucking socialism where we have a five year plan.

I swear, two things I dislike: incompetence and laziness. And incompetence can generally be cured with some lecturing if the other party is willing to listen.

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

Fellow developers,
For all people asking u to be partners of their "billionaire" idea, and to be paid from revenue ONLY when the plateform goes live or shit like this, BEWARE.
For all of them i had the same answer: "ok, ill share with you the project, but until it goes live, i am the only one who is giving sacrifice, and since we are partners, i want us both to do same level of sacrifices in order to deserve later the share of revenue... That being said, u have to pay the hours of devlopment, all of them, and when it goes live, from the revenue ill get, ill pay you back what you paid on dev cost"

It is the only way to be really even...
And if he refuse, ask them again "why? I taought u where 100% sure that your idea will work and become a billionaire why u think it is risky tp pay few thousands????"
... Now he is having second thaughts

I feel like at some point it'll become more shit than it's ever been. Partially due to the fact that it seems like EVERY school is trying to get the students into computer science at this point.

NOT EVERYBODY BELONGS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE. PLAIN AND SIMPLE. IT'S NOT FOR EVERYONE.

I feel like some kids that are being forced to do computer science will basically be like "huh there's money in this, maybe I could do this" but they're completely shit at it, when they would have been MUCH better off doing something else.

Side rant, somewhat related actually:

I had a teacher last semester that has to teach one of the computer science classes starting this year (I was not taking her computer science class, it was an unrelated class). From what I've seen, she does not seem fit to teach the class at all.

She's supposed to be teaching some simple programming (no clue what languages, I didn't bother to take the comp sci class). And she knows that I know the stuff, so she would ask me about the simplest things. Which is 100% fine...if she wasn't teaching a computer science class.

She just does not seem fit to teach a computer science class. I'm sure that the school basically just threw her in there because they needed SOMEONE.

I'm honestly kinda scared for the students in the class that might want to go further into computer science, only having taken that class and having met the requirement for a more advanced class, but then being thrown into a class where they don't know a fucking thing.

I’ve begun to notice a distinct pattern with devs. I realise it has probably always been there but Im just thinking out loud as Ive started to actively notice it.

*Dev has literally one problem with a library/framework/environment*

“Holy crap <NAME> is the worst thing ever!! its actually worse than an STD. whoever made it needs to quit making software and become a goat farmer” (paraphrasing of course)

What is it with us that the second we have difficulty with a library or framework we immediately brand it as a cancerous polyp on the anus of humanity?

Screw the German Telekom!
I recently got a new home without internet so naturally, I went to an isp, Telekom. I went there a few weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised by the personal and the general competence. He told me they would send a technician to check my cable. So I thought great and went home. 1 A week passes, nobody shows up. I then went back to the shop and asked(someone different). He basically told me that such a service must be specifically asked for and a contract has to be signed. I then told
him his colleague told me no such thing, and that the technician should have checked up on my connection last week. He excuses him self and I signed the thingy.

Now you would imagine that this would have worked.
but.
NOOOoooo.

A week came and went and I got pissed. So I went back to the shop the guy from the first try was there. I Asked what happened, he types in his Computer. and. and. and. nothing. Apparently, the previous guy forgot, fucking forgot, to enter my request to their bloody System.
Now I asked if I can Just become a customer.
Guy: Sure, what speed is available in your region?
Me: I don't know...
Guy: Let me check
/Type/ /Type/
Guy: I can't see your speed the technician should have checked.
Me: Um, so, can he check?
Guy: Clearly you don't know what you want
Me:???
Guy:*leaves table*

(shorten but you get the Idea)

At this point, I really wanted to change isp so I went to Vodafone.

Lady comes up to me asks me a bunch of stuff and I explain I would want to change my phone, internet, tv, mobile and my friends mobile(I lost a bet once ^~^) to Vodafone.

What happened next I can't really explain, but she talked to her boss and "cheated" (how she calls it) on Vodafone and got me an AMAZING deal it is cheaper than Telekoms has waay more mobile data, faster Internet and I got a new phone :D.

And guess what she could fucking check, fucking check from here Computer my max internet speed.

I can only hope that the lady got a big fat commission for what she has done.

- Project for a 40+b$ company.
- No business analysis.
- Only some 64 pages tech paper dividing the project in 4 iterations (pretty well written).
- « Please estimate the first iteration ».
- Can we do it in 2 weeks? Only items in first iteration, I think we can but we need a BA before we accept the project.
- Confirmed by senior dev front. 10 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- Confirmed by senior dev back. 12 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- UX/UI senior designer says he can't estimate such a technical, says we defo need a BA before any estimations.

PM, who is actually the department manager, says OK we can do it. No BA and estimations are halved, UI/UX 2 days.

He fucking signs the contract.

SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER, WE NEED STUFF FROM FUTURE ITERATIONS IF WE DON'T WANT TO THROW AWAY ALL THE FIRST ITER WORK.

PROJECT BECOME A CLUSTERFUCK.
NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ANYTHING. THE CLIENT HAS NO CLUE EITHER.

The fucking dep. mgr assigns another PM and says he don't have time anymore.

NOBODY HAS A CLUE WHAT THE PROJECT IS AT THIS POINT.

We have 3 days left.

Whole team came to a conclusion: the only sane thing to do is to give our grouped resignation letters.

Thanks. It was fun while it lasted. Your dep. can go to hell.

The amount of much political correctness in the dev community just pisses me off sometimes.

I've watched "Use the right tool / language for the job" has become *THE* excuse for shitty tools and languages. 

Case in point -- JavaScript. If you want to make a website that interacts with the end user, the right tool is JavaScript. But that's because IT'S THE ONLY TOOL. Does that make it a *good* tool?

HELL NO.

/midranttimeout

Brendan Eich, I forgive you. You had 10 days and a corporation on your case.

That's not saying JavaScript doesn't have some good things in it. It does. But "Javascript the good parts" is a fucking thin book.

Sure, some amazing things have been written in JavaScript. Great communities have coalesced around this cancer.

BUT THATS IN SPITE OF JAVASCRIPT, NOT BECAUSE OF IT. AS A LANGAUGE IT'S STILL A STEAMING PILE OF DOGSHIT.

A master can draw great art with a shitty piece of charcoal. That doesn't make charcoal THE BEST DRAWING TOOL EVARRR. It's just a testament to the master's craft.

If you started your programming journey with JavaScript, do expand your horizons.

Break free from Stockholm's syndrome.

Discard your cognitive dissonance.

See JavaScript for what it is -- a shitty language everyone was forced to use. 

PS: Don't even get me started on Java ...

Around 45 days ago after years of burnout and abuse I finally quit my job when I finally realised that all the promises of greener pastures and reinforcements were nothing but tales of sugar candy mountain.

I had no idea where or what I wanted to work on or even have any leads for work but I knew if I kept recursively burning out soon there wouldn't be anything left of me to give.

Flashforward 45 days and I am the proud owner of Sane software solutions which I am currently the only full time employee of.
My old company has become my customer since no one else knows the legacy system, 11 days after quitting their invoice exceeded my previous salary with a quarter of the work and I just landed an awesome contract with some engineers I feel privileged to listen to working on some neat IOT stuff, I've quadrupled my income and now work an 8 hour day.

Don't be despondent, there are better things in life to bleed for than another mother fuckers ambitions ✌

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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

Ugh.

➡️You Are Not A Software Developer⬅️

When I became a developer, I thought that my job is to write software. When my customer had a problem, I was ready to write software that solves that problem. I was taught to write software.

But what customers need is not software. They need a solution to their problem. Your job is to find the most cost-effective solution, what software often is not.

According to the universal law of software development, more code leads to more bugs:

e = mc²

Or

errors = (more code)²

The number of bugs grows with the amount of code. You have to prioritize, reproduce and fix bugs.

The more code you write, the more your team and the team after it has to maintain. Even if you split the system into micro services, the complexity remains.

Writing well-tested, clean code takes a lot of time. When you’re writing code, other important work is idle. The work that prevents your company from becoming rich.

A for-profit company wants to make money and reduce expenses. Then the company hires you to solve problems that prevent it from becoming rich. Confused by your job title, you take their money and turn it into expensive software.

But business has nothing to do about software. Even software business is not about software. Business is about making money.

Your job is to understand how the company is making money, help make more money and reduce expenses. Once you know that, you will become the most valuable asset in the company.

Stop viewing yourself as a software developer. You are a money maker.

Think about how to save and make money for your customers.

Find the most annoying problem and fix it:

▶️Is adding a new feature too costly? Solve the problem manually.
▶️Is testing slow? Become a tester.
▶️Is hiring not going well? Speak at a meetup and advertise your company.
▶️Is your team not productive enough? Bring them coffee.

Your job title doesn’t matter. Ego doesn’t matter either.

Titles and roles are distracting us from what matters to our customers – money.💸

You are a money maker. Thinking as a money maker can help choose the next skill for development. For example:

Serverless: pay only for resources you consume, spend less time on capacity planning = 💰

Machine Learning: get rid of manual decision-making = 💰

TDD: shorter feedback cycle, fewer bugs = 💰

Soft Skills: inspire teammates, so they are more productive and happy = 💰

If you don’t know what to learn next — answer a simple question:

What skills can help my company make more money and reduce expenses?

Very unlikely it’s another web framework written in JavaScript.

Article by Eduards Sizovs
Sizovs.net

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

!rant
I would like to ask you guys for advice.

I am a content manager who is gradually given more and more dev tasks. That is great because I want to become a webdev. However I have one big issue. Whenever I write code (any code) I feel ashamed because I know that anyone else could do better. I am also ashamed to show my work to my colleagues because I am afraid of what they might think of me. I know that they are good people and they would probably help me out but still...

Someone once tried to explain to me that I am not my code and whenever my code is being evaluated I am not the one who is being judged, it is my code, my current knowledge. I understand conceptually what he was trying to tell me but I just can't feel it.

Did you have similar feelings when you started out?
Thanks in advance.

For some reason the office I work for is paying for a designer to become a front end developer and she gets to take the classes one work time. Any time I want to further my career or pay I have to pay out of pocket and it can't interfere with work. Additionally I have to deal with her asking me every other day why I use Sublime over something else.

Basically I use Sublime because I spent too much time researching new things to try and learn yet another editor. If you wanna use brackets, cool, if you wanna use atom, cool, if you wanna use notepad, cool. I don't give a flying fuck what editor you use, you're writing CSS, I'm writing PHP, if you can count to 4 spaces, and not look at my code, I'm not going to scream at you.

She comes in each day and sits at her desk watching video after video on beginner HTML and CSS asking me mundane questions breaking my concentration at least once an hour.

I know we all started somewhere but Google was my best friend and should be yours as well.

Teacher: what is 1 + 1?

kid : I don't know

Teacher: Ok! you have one man and one women, how many are there?

Kid: Three.

Teacher: how?

Kid: There was my mom and dad, when they add up we become three.

Teacher: %(;:)--,^$

Hipsters be like: i aM iN cOnTrOl oF mY oWn LiFe

And then proceed to give away their Calendly link.

Fucking hilarious. They fail to realise that time is the most important entity anyone can have. And they give it away to strangers to control their time.

Imagine, giving access and control of your most important entity of your life to some random stranger on internet.

I coincidently found this. I had to read it three times before I understood what the message was.

I am slowly getting back to my life where I had good work life balance, but this time I am paid well with lots of learning.

I am on my way to become a time millionaire.

Admin Access

Have you ever been in a position where you become the de-facto person who works with a certain tool, but are denied full admin access to that tool for no real reason?

Two years ago I was put on the Observability squad and quickly discovered it was my thing, implementing tracking and running queries on this third-party tool, building custom stuff to monitor our client-side successes and failures.

About a year ago I hit the point where if you asked anyone "Who is the go-to person for help/questions/queries/etc. for this tool", the answer was just me lol. It was nice to have that solid and clear role, but a year later, that's still the case, and I'm still not an admin on this platform. I've asked, in an extremely professional way armed with some pretty good reasons, but every time I'm given some lame non-answer that amounts to No.

As far as I'm aware, I'm the only dev on our team at all who uses custom/beta features on this site, but every time I want to use them I have to go find an admin and ask for an individual permission. Every time. At the end of 2020 it was happening once a month and it was so demoralizing hitting up people who never even log into this site to ask them to go out of their way to give me a new single permission.

People reach out to me frequently to request things I don't have the permissions to do, assuming I'm one of the 64 admins, but I have to DM someone else to actually do the thing.

At this point it feels very much like having to tug on the sleeve of a person taller than me to get what I need, and I'm out of ways to convince myself this isn't demoralizing. I know this is a pretty common thing in large companies, meaningless permissions protocols, and maybe it's because I came from IT originally that it's especially irritating. In IT you have admin access to everything and somehow nobody gets hurt lol-- It still blows my mind that software devs who make significantly more money and are considered "higher up" the chain (which i think is dumb btw) are given less trust when it comes to permissions.

Has anyone figured out a trick that works to convince someone to grant you access when you're getting stonewalled? Or maybe a story of this happening to you to distract me from my frustration?

I am quitting my job in the next couple of weeks. I don't even have a job lined up. I can't deal with doing Design work as a developer when you have a whole ass design team. Like what the fuck. Then I nearly do development. Oh and your gonna bitch at me when I mess up in design, then threaten to fire me? Well you can shove that shit all up your entire ass. Fuck this Job. I am doing my own thing. I don't care if I become homeless cause Fuck I'll be more happier I did that then be at this concentration camp. I am gonna live my life and own. Cause fuck everything corporate Jobs is fucking life sucking. Please Fire me. I GIVE NO FUCKS ANYMORE. Sick of being depressed and stressed. I want to be a real developer!!!! argghhhhhhhhhhhh

27 years old, been in 3 jobs. Hired in a new job. Confidence has went up and down like shit. Life has become more real than ever before.

What have I learned through all these bumpy rides?

Life is journey, it goes up and it goes down. But what you may not realize is that everything that happens to you, is for you to learn.

Happy Friday to everyone in this unknown path, just enjoy that you are alive, can breathe and see things with your magical eyes.

God exists for sure.

Apple's marketing department are just dictionary junkies.

Have you guys read some of the latest Apple quotes for their products? You know, the ones where you visit the page and there's some large bold text summarising the product? Here's a few:

HomePod: "The new sound of home."
If you talk over my Spotify music YOU WILL BECOME THE NEW SOUND OF MY SHED.

iPhone X: "Say hello to the future."
E.Musk put a Tesla in space. Also the future can crash with a single character.

MacOS: "Your Mac. Elevated."
If you fly away I WILL use you as birthday balloon.

iPad Pro: "Anything you can do, you can do better."
SOONER OR LATER *Comment what you would put here*

But I mean hey. It sells right.
Reading it back maybe I'm just blind hating.

(backstory -> I have 10 years of experience as a software engineer)

Me: So I would like to develop myself to become "officially" a senior engineer

Manager: sure, you basically need to show consistent behaviour

Me: ok, but what specifically? on what criteria do you determine when it is time for promotion?

Manager: there isn't anything like that defined yet, we would like to work on a definition of roles and responsibilities, but we're not there yet

Me: ok but how did you do it so far?

Manager; well as I said, you have to show consistent behaviour that characterises you as a senior.

Me: ....

I used to be a lousy software developer, and I used to settle for what I knew. Until my sister told me that my mother spoke of me to the family as a successful professional, someone who had overcome the poverty where he grew up and now lived in another country. Since then I have struggled to become a better professional, a better husband and in a few months i want to be the best that! My wife's pregnant!

Controversial tech rant begins here:

You know, I'm sure a lot of you guys know that it is pretty uncommon to encounter a woman who is who is into tech (and ranting about said tech). This has always made people question why. I personally feel like that is the case because those that do like tech, and those that don't just find a different interest. I thought that would suffice, but now Google and Microsoft are advertising their diversity programs. I was fine with all that until I was personally affected by it. I intended to apply for scholarships from Microsoft. They turned me away because according to them, they began giving them only to people who were "marginalized". That and their commercials trying to pressure young girls to join the STEM field. Again nothing wrong with women in the tech field, but now that this is turning into favoritism I have to fight harder battles to compete in the tech industry. Not only that, but now I read a study about their employment. Despite the number of people they turned away and the money they spent on these programs, thr companies STILL haven't become any more diverse, and from what it seems, their reaction lately has been to double-down and try harder. I just want an open, honest, and fair tech community. Has anyone else felt the affects of this situation?

Please disregard. I just need to vent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just want to go back to pure dev.

Story: A sudden pleasant realisation about myself...

Realized today that I have reached a level of Developer I always wanted to have reached.. A junior forgot his mouse, I gave him mine and took out old trusty hacky scroll from the cupboard, the junior brought batteries as a thank you, I told him thanks but there was no need, I have coded without a mouse and can do again if need be, no issues really... I have even used my phone over wifi as a mouse, I can dev as long as I have some form of something at my disposal... Had a meeting where I had to implement a feature for something that was mentioned in a meeting I was never invited for a bunch of months prior, that had to go live today, asked all the right questions, remained calm, tested like a pro and it was practically seamlessly inserted into the system by yours truly... I was proud of my work on a different level to be honest.. Had a difficult meeting with my manager, but kept really calm, stated the facts effortlessly and made him feel comfortable too, happy ending and happy resolution. Then I spent the ride home trying to project an fm station using my phone.. by the time we got home me and my colleague found a solution to be tested soon... It was only when I put my phone down after closing all my research tabs and deleting the apps used for the day that will not be needed tomorrow when I realised how awesome I seem to have become... Treating myself to a juicy burger and coke with gaming tonight. Something is bound to go sideways again sometime. But you know what, it seems like I'll be just fine.. Somewhere I seem to have become exactly who I wanted to be.. Now for further goals and higher aims while maintaining this person I only noticed today.

It doesn't feel good to be average at everything.

Life is depressing

I can't commit to anything hard enough to become the best.

Programming
Singing
Drawing
Story making
Sports

I'm just average.
I feel bad
I feel like I'm a waste of resources.

I'm tired of ranting.
This life is just tiring.
I don't have the patience

I'm average at commitments.
Time management

I see other people code and sing better than me and feel demotivated

I feel like jumping of a cliff cause no matter what I do, there's someone light years ahead of me.

I'm not even unique
Ultimately that's probably what I want.
To be irreplaceable.

I guess in this struggle to be relevant I'm gonna lose myself and if I do get there, I might not be as happy anyways.

So what's the point to all this

I can't figure out shit..
To be honest I created this profile just so I can write down somewhere what I am going through.
So, once upon a time I had graduated from college and went right into a corporate (has only been 2 years since). I was fortunate enough that I got assigned a project that was just starting, and even though I had no clue what was going on, I started doing whatever was assigned.
I initially worked in java and then finished all my tasks earlier than expected, so they switched me to another C++ project that builds on top of it.
Fast forward 2.5 years, I'm now the team lead of the CPP project and all my friends who were in the core team have left the company.
As usual, the reason behind it is shitty management. These mfs won't hire competent people and WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT retain the ones that are. I can feel it in my bones that it is time for me to leave, but fuck me if I understand what I am good at.
I have been able to handle all the tasks that they threw at me, be it java or c++ - just because I love logic and algorithms. I have been dabbling in ML and AI since 4-5 years now, but could never go into it full time.
Now I'm looking at the job postings and Jesus Christ these bitches do not understand what they want. I have to be expert in 34567389 technologies, mastering each of whom (by mastering I mean become proficient in) would need at least 6-8 months if not more, all with 82146867+ years of experience in them.
I don't know if I am supposed to learn on Java (so spring boot and stuff) or I'm supposed to do c++ or I'm gonna go with Python or should I learn web dev or database management or what.
I like all of these things, and would likely enjoy working in each of these, but for fucks sake my cv doesn't show this and most of the bitch ass recruiter portals keep putting my cv in the bin.
Yeah...
If you have read so far, here's a picture of a cat and a dog.

Got a CTO at my Unity job that's younger than me, which by itself is fine, but the only reason this guy was put into that position was because the previous CTO left the company at the time where I was relatively new and he is the person most familiar with the codebase of our primary project than I was at the time.

I understood the decision at the time, but still, having a position of power being handed to them just as a matter of inheritance doesn't command my respect. Nevertheless, I withheld my judgement at the time to see how his leadership goes.

Not even 1 year in and this young CTO started making jabs at me, calling my code hard to read and incomprehensible, to my face, in front of everybody else.

Motherfucker, I don't find his code easy to read either but I went out of my way to frequently ask him, the previous CTO and other teammates to clarify what they wrote here and there. He on the other, made no attempt to ask me for clarification and instead waited until company meetings to air these grievances.

Our boss started to ask me to follow SOLID principles (even though he can't recite what that acronym means) due to complaint from the CTO guy, even though the CTO guy doesn't even follow SOLID himself! But I took the higher road and didn't flip it right back on him.

What I did propose in return though, is that the dev team start using pull requests and have a code review process if the CTO wants to sign off on everything that gets in the codebase. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Not for this guy! He immediately starts complaining that reviewing pull requests would be more work for him. Motherfucker, you refused to go to my table to ask for clarifications about my code yet still want to understand what goes on, then do code review.

It was at this point that I realized that this guy doesn't actually want me to write good, clear code. He wants me to write code HIS way so that he can understand. Yeah okay, I can accept that idea in isolation. Some open-source projects require contributors to follow certain coding convention to make the maintainers' job easier too. One project that immediately came to mind is "In-game Debug Console for Unity 3D" (disclosure: I am a contributor to this project)

But guess what?

THIS COMPANY DOESN'T HAVE A FREAKING CODING CONVENTION. NOT WRITTEN DOWN ANYWHERE. NOT EVEN A VOCAL ONE.

What this CTO guy wants from me is a complete blackbox.

To all fellow devs out there, I hope you don't work with a CTO like this, or become one.

Python. Ok, so it's a really cool language, as a scripting language it's awesome, quick to write.

When it's been used to make full fledged oop programs that you suddenly have to maintain things like duck typing become problematic. Looking at an object fuck knows what methods are available. Worse still when some bastard that thinks he's being clever doesn't bother declaring any object attributes and instead overrides the __set_attr method to dynamically add them as they are used there is no hope for the poor sod that has to maintain it later.

I've also now worked out I'm at least the 3rd person having been given the task of maintaining it, i spent a day changing CLI options wondering why they didn't do anything but occasionally crash the app. I've now found a few thousand lines deep that someone had hard-coded these values because they couldn't work out where to get the CLI args from!

I've gained a new appreciation for nominative, strictly typed languages.

HR: you didn’t write in your job experience that you know kubernetes and we need people who know it.

Me: I wrote k8s

HR: What’s that ?

…
Do you know docker ?
Do you know what docker is ?
Do you use cloud ?
Can you read and write ?
Are you able to open the door with your left hand ?
What if we cut your hands and tell you to open the doors, how would you do that ?
What are your salary expectations?
Do you have questions, I can’t answer but I can forward them. Ask question, ask question, questions are important.
What is minimal wage you will agree to work ?
You wrote you worked with xy, are you comfortable with yx ?
We have fast hiring process consisting of 10 interviews, 5 coding assessments, 3 talks and finally you will meet the team and they will decide if you fit.
Why do you want to work … here ?
Why you want to work ?
How dare you want to work ?
Just find work, we’re happy you’re looking for it.
What databases you know ?
Do you know nosql databases ?
We need someone that knows a,b,c,d….x,y,z cause we use 1,2,3 … 9,10.
We need someone more senior in this technology cause we have more junior people.
Are you comfortable with big data?
We need someone who spoke on conference cause that’s how we validate that people can speak.
I see you haven’t used xy for a while ( have 5 years experience with xy ) we need someone who is more expert in xy.
How many years of experience you have in yz ??? (you need to guess how many we want cause we look for a fortune teller )

Not much changed in job hunting, taking my time to prepare to leetcode questions about graphs to get a job in which they will tell me to move button 1px to the left.

Need to make up some stories about how I was bad person at work and my boss was angry and told me to be better so I become better and we lived happy ever after. How I argued with coworkers but now I’m not arguing cause I can explain. How bad I was before and how good I am now. Cause you need to be a better person if you want to work in our happy creepy company.

Because you know… the tree of DOOM… The DOMs day.

The other day a non-programmer colleague asked me:
"How do you know what to type in, like, did you write all of that?"
As I responded, he asked me another question; "but how do you know wuat to type".

I use to have those same thoughts years ago.

It occurred to me that through constant bugs, errors, bad (team) projects and failures that its become second nature, like breathing.

So, as an experienced developer to people just learning the craft and juniors. Don't give up on your collabs, don't be disheartened by group projects, don't be discouraged by your peers who seemingly try to make your life harder.

Take it as an experience to better yourself and teach them something.

These are the experiences that will make you a better developer.

!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...

Im getting a bit tired of programming.

I have been struggling for years regarding programming. I did have some moments of perceived success, but most of the time it has been depressing.

I’m not sure if I dislike programming. But there are some aspects of it that make me feel not as passionate about it.

First of, programs are invisible. No one sees your program or you (assuming we’re talking about a non artistic dev job).

People can’t see lines of code executing, but even if they did it would be gibberish to them.

Users can only become aware of bad software and that kind of breaks my heart a bit.

You could write fast, stable, secure, easy to read, easy to update software. People won’t notice. Hell, even your boss/coworkers might not notice.

In fact, sometimes you try to do the good thing, you try to become a better dev, you try to write tests first, you try to i18n, and what do you get? “Uhh, that’s taking too much time and I don’t see the benefit”.

I know some people will say that people noticing bad service happens on every job.

But programming is the ultimate isolation job. No client has ever told me “hey that code you wrote was pretty good”. They can’t even read code.

I don’t know the users, the users don’t know me, and the users can only judge my program by the result, they can only judge the visual interface.

Let’s say you write a cool project at github. The code is great. Guess what, every language’s ecosystem out there is saturated. Everything is already written. GitHub is saturated. Your best project ends up being a just for yourself enjoyment.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy code for yourself. That’s how I bet most prolific coders start. I’ve been doing that for many years now. But at some point you want to be part of something with humans.

Imagine I’m stranded on an island with nothing no humans, just food, water and a computer. Would I write code just for myself, just for fun? I think I would off myself 3 months in.

Maybe I should do develop a more social talent...

Life is hard.

You are born. DNA gets determined. You go through infancy.

Puberty comes and DNA is like
"uh from now you'll pretty much have strong sexual urges, a huge desire to be sexually prolific, nothing weird like being pedo or into rape though".

me: Uh ok.
dna: oh, also, you're gonna be one of those late bloomers, you know, you talk like shit, you dress like shit, you smell like shit.
life: that's true and also you don't have anyone in your life to teach you about that shit, so forget about kissing, having sex, let alone being in a relationship for a long time.

*a lot of years go by with a lot of missed opportunities, mistakes and regrets*

life: ok, you seem to have become a decent sex partner out of a lot of scarring experiences, but there's one problem: you've fallen in love with somebody.

and you're married

and you have kids

me: well, does that mean I can't fuck other people?
life: yeah, no. I'm surprised I even have to explain that, it's called cheating. It will pretty much ruin your marriage, and fuck up your kids.

me: ok, I guess no then. I'm still fortunate enough to have sex with my wife right?

life: yeah... but you still want to fuck other people
me: what???
life: yeah, did you think that falling in love would make you not want to fuck other people? fuck no

me: ok, well I'm very grateful that I get to experience sex at all.
life: yes... there's a thing though, your partner has a much much lower libido than you.

me: ok, well maybe if I exercise and dress better that might change
life: that will definitely help, you'll feel more confident and have more stamina, but every time you retry exercising, you remember how much you hate it and how little stamina you have.
oh, I'm sorry, I forgot you had kids and work, yeah no time or energy for that.

me: ok, then should I just embrace a more liberal lifestyle, like becoming a swinger?
life: ha, fat chance, it's a very taboo thing and you're not that liberal, neither is she.

me: uhhh, i guess i can sometimes watch porn then...
life: watching porn regularly will make the only sex that you have worse, according to statistics.

me: ok, I guess I should get ripped

So, today's comedy job story (and how depressive things become), and it's only 9:30.

Stressed PM assaults me at 8 to tell me what I have to do, standing next to me and dictacting stuff she wants done. Hate that.

As I went to a colleague to help her out with these fucking presentations (she "couldn't open them"), as I just arrived to her office my phone rings.

It's my PM. I'm 20m away, she calls me. Ok.

Me: "Yes?"
PM: "Hey Phlisg, erm, we are stuck in a conference room, can you come and open the door?"
Me: "Erm, the door has no handle, can't help"
PM: "Can you call the "housekeeper"?"
Me: "Sure" (why the hell doesn't she have his number...)

I go downstairs, go towards the conference room, and before the door there is the reception office. I ask the colleagues in there if the "housekeeper" is here, but they instead produced the handle from their drawers, and went to the door to open it.

At the same time, a person locked inside the conference room went through the window to go round and try to open the door.

Door successfully opened by colleague with handle.

I mean...

WHAT

THE

FUCK!

You have a problem? One reflex: call Phlisg. She might call me at 2 am in the morning because she cannot sleep or something.

Pissed!!

After a decade of working in the web development industry, I have given up all hope, it's the same fucking stupid ideas, the same retarded problems in every damned company . Monkeys discovering and reinventing the same fucking wheel over and over and over again. From a 5 man company to the unicorn scaleup (and everything between) I have had to implement access control systems, and various REST API's following the design made by mongrels who do it the first time . I have become to hate the work I once was so passionate about. Just fuck this shit , if anybody had told me when I was in my early 20's that this is what I end up doing I'd go and learn to be a carpenter instead.

I'll admit - I come from a WordPress background of almost 9 years in the making. I guess I can justify it because of all of the sites I created using it, it was the best that it could be on WP. Fast, efficient, custom - none of that off-the-shelf themeforest crap. I created everything custom. I actually knew what was going on behind the scenes of WP.

And then a buddy of mine and I had an idea for a new company/software project. I was smart enough to know that WP was not the foundation for this, so I did some NodeJS/Express tutorials. Started learning React, and really getting into the Javascript world.

And now I'm wondering WHY IN THE ABSOLUTE FUCK I ever bothered trying to become an expert in WP. It's the largest use of PHP in the fucking world and it doesn't even have native composer support. And by the time you actually get your project set up using composer you have to add a fucking mirror of the wordpress.org plugin repo to get anything to work. It's 2018 and you'd think that WP and composer would have all of this shit figured out by now.

And don't get me started on git - as soon as you have more than 1 person working on a WP site, I hope you have hourly backups of your DB because someones work will get overwritten. So you all either need to work on the same staging area of work around each other by pushing/pulling the DB and schedule your workflows.

I guess WP CLI and the REST API are a step in the right direction, but the foundation of everything is just so fucked up.

I don't feel like I've wasted my web dev career, but I definitely wish I had started down this path a lot earlier. I guess you don't know what you don't know. Thanks for reading!

Update on my old rant: I started writing type definitions for our project (it's basically a chunk of separate files where you document the objects you use; typed languages have this out of the box, js doesn't and it may become useful depending on the size of the project). Our codebase is reasonably big -not complicated, but big- and I felt like I was losing track of all the properties\objects\usage\comments\whatever. So I iiterally wrote some ts interfaces: properties with name and types, that's it, so you know what you're passing around.
Proposal was denied, I'll have to delete the documentation; "keeping the doc updated is going to require more work".

Me: Ok, but what am I supposed to do when I need to interface with your code? Run the debugger and figure out what the fuck you guys are passing around?
Team leader: Yes 😊

It was a Monday morning, and I did what most people do - I got up late. When I came to senses, I realized I have an important client meeting today.
I ran towards my closet and grabbed my favorite shirt, but it was a mess, badly wrinkled.

But no problem, I decided to put this task on my old but trusty laptop, I waked up my laptop (Which has just celebrated its 12th birthday yesterday), it literally coughed 100 times as i opened 3-4 chrome tabs and android studio on it. Within a minute , my newly found laptop-iron become as hot as the surface of sun, i gently placed my shirt under it and in 5 seconds my shirt was looking brand new !!! I quickly got dressed up , while my laptop was cursing me at the back.

Luckily my meeting went well and we secured a new project, on my way home I was happy and satisfied that my oldy has found a new purpose of life as a makeshift iron.

I returned home, and to my surprise my laptop was'nt turning on....!!! I though maybe its tired from todays work so i let him rest..........

so i had the "miscommunication" meeting with PM today. he criticized me for "not following his orders", allegedly having worked on stuff during this sprint that did not help fulfill his sprint goal, and that i should have aligned my work with him. i didn't even realize this exact goal existed specifically for my user story (even though it was at least mentioned with one single word in story description, must have read over it). however, during the whole fucking sprint, he never mentioned a single time i should align with him. every daily i'm explaining what i'm going to do, every day he sees subtasks that i created for this story, and he never disagreed or mentioned this topic, so i assumed i'm on track. and now suddenly, when sprint is over, he blames me for the misalignment?

he also criticized me for having said something rude to him during a team meeting, but he couldn't rephrase or specify what i had said, he couldn't give any details at all, and also i couldn't understand or remember what he meant. what shall i respond to that?🤷‍♀️

also, aligning my work with that of a colleague and brainstorming with him about how our API could look like for our stakeholders was "not on track / following his orders" for him, even though i had announced it in the daily and he hadn't disagreed.

either this guy has alzheimer's or he has a down on me, dunno what to make out of all that.
and then he mentions i appear "somewhat aggressive" to him.
hmm weird, why should someone become aggressive when they have to deal with this bullshit all the time 🤦‍♀️

I wrote my first line of code at 12. I fell in love with it and continued. I'm 25 now and I'm a software engineer. I don't even have time or energy to work on personal projects anymore. Writing code isn't a hobby anymore. It's a means to survive. Why/how did this happen? When will building things be fun again? Before landing my first job as an engineer, not once did I consider salaries, equity, atmosphere, nor any of the other amenities (or lack thereof) of code as a profession. But, I don't even know when any of that fell into the picture and they've managed to suck the novelty out of a really cool pastime. I'm essentially a well-paid robot. Who did this? What's happening? What can I do to find the freedom I once had? When did I become just another cog in a machine? Should I try my hand in business, bent on making a lot of money so I can retire early and have time to experiment again? Is that unrealistic? Should I buy lottery tickets every paycheck? We only get one life and I realized this. I'm panicking because I know I'm not enjoying myself and that I'm not on track to leave the world better than it was when I was born into it. So much loss. I'm grateful, but this is not cool at all. I want my hobby back.

Part 3: today has become a blog post.

WARNING: this is loooooooooooong

Background is my boss and I were talking about hiring the right people, also generalists vs specialists.

Essentially John and I are the specialists. When something goes wrong it ends up escalating to either him or me. But this is not sustainable as I can't handle the stress and most likely he eventually won't either.

And this goes back to general hiring standards.

All the good people leave and the remaining ones are stuck with all the problems and eventually for one reason or another they leave as well... or the code keeps getting worse... until someone decides to scrap everything and build a new one... But now the only people left to lead teams are monkeys.

Now current problem is the only person that can replace me is John and the only person that can replace John, at least in handling issues, is me...

It's a certain type of person, people that have a growth mindset and can pick things up.

Google and strong tech companies are full of these types of people where if needed there's always someone that can step in and help. They have the background and the ability to quickly learn. This also lets them innovate and identify and solve new problems.

I think that's what the technical interviews are for, to find these types of people.

And you really can't train this. I'm not sure how effective our "new" training program on high quality development is but I'm guessing it's not. Excellence has to be in the culture and it's not something that can be built overnight or by randomly hiring people.

So in a sense, tech companies aren't really paying well, they're paying cost to what their hires are really worth, after they've verified it, and enough to keep them from leaving.

TLDR: Read the post.

Bare with me here, I am new to all of this jazz. But I wanted to tell a story.

I have been a programmer for a while now, working on various projects with various companies, doing various things. I know that sounds vague, but it's the truth.

I never work on the same thing, ever, I never work with any fancy IDE, because I don't need one. I personally believe no developer works with the massive huge code base all at once, but instead works on it in pieces. That's a story for another day.

I have seen the shittiest of the shittiest and some how survived, I have been beaten down by code bases that were out sourced yet some how managed to stand up and gain my baring and fight back. I have dealt with clients, bosses and idiots from A-Z. Watching them all scramble around for their pennies like greedy rich white men seeking more pennies to swim in.

Some how I survived all this. I started working from home almost 3 years ago, the freedom is exhilarating. The ability to fuck off for most of the day and work at night, or work all morning and fuck off. There's nothing better.

As you work from home you think, this will be amazing. Until the crippling loneliness takes over and even the 6th bottle of beer doesn't quench the thirst of human contact. The pain of being trapped in the four white walls of your office makes that bottle of tequila, to numb out the emptiness inside look more satisfying.

At some point, you crawl out of your space to find people to interact with, refusing to be beaten down by both shit code and loneliness only to find all your friends, family and significant others are working, in offices, where they cant just fuck off for a day with you. The silence of the house, the office, the what ever becomes deafening.

its crawling all over you like bugs that pick away at your mind, breaking you, hating you. So you decide that a coffee shop is the best place, only to sit there and people watch or check Facebook or what ever else people do at coffee shops that isn't actually work.

The point in all of this, is that working from home is both a positive and a negative. It has destroyed me, created a workaholic and, probably, an alcoholic. There isnt a day I dont wish that I could sleep away the deafening silence of the world around me as every one busies off to the office.

One might think: get an office job, but I have become accustomed to my misery, pain and suffering of working from home, isolated and medicated by vaping and alcohol. the freedom, from what I have found, is worth more then the sacrifice of it - to work around people I slowly begin to hate, people that make me want to overdose on anything rather then see their smug faces and be beaten down by their idiotic words, code bases and money grubbing hands...

I guess I'll get back to work now, in my house, with my cats, my vape and my beer. Here's to freedom and the sacrifices that go along with it.

I quit my job… it got so exhausting, it had become all about last minute work and ETAs. The more I worked the sicker I felt. It started directly impacting my physical health which ended up affecting mentally too. I feel good that I got out of something very toxic but at the same time not working kinda makes me sad when I look at others working. I have consciously taken a break to clear my mind but it affects me that I don’t know what next.

Me: So you have no work experience, and majored in liberal arts, but you did go through a 6 months bootcamp, right?
Candidate: Yeah.
Me: sounds good, we will have to work together with you for a long while until you become independent, but I think you can definitely do this. What are you salary expectations?
Candidate: I'm thinking of 5000.
Me: Aight, thanks for your time! We'll send you more details later

Around here, 5000 (arbitrary made up number) is what you pay someone with around 3 years of experience at least. It's always these pampered fucks from rich countries that want to earn a shitton of money for the grand effort of going to a goddamn bootcamp for some months. That is their definition of effort and hard work, because it seems they've never once in their lives had any sort of hardship or struggle beyond crying that dad got them an Android instead of an iPhone. If you leave them alone they can't do jack shit because they've never worked in real, big projects, so you gotta invest a lot of time in them. Which is fine, everyone starts from somewhere. But what kinda balls do you have to demand a mid level salary when you have done basically nothing so far, and your knowledge is superficial at best?

I know that a lot of jobs and recruiters give bottom of the barrel shit, but I swear some candidates are insane. Unpopular rant I assume but I just needed to scream a bit.

A couple of months ago, the father of a friend of mine, asked me if I wanted to help him out with a project.

His late father, whom he inherited a one-person upholstering company from, once created a system in filemaker to do, among others, his financial administration. This system, however, grew organically as time went by, but he passed away before he explained to his son how it worked.

Now this man was running the company, using the parts of the system that he knows, but things were starting to break down. He asked me if I could help him understand what is going on and fix a couple of things.

However, the more I look at it, the more I realize what a monstrosity this has become, because the system has never been cleaned up. For example:

- There is a suppliers table, with the columns "E-MAIL" and "EMAIL". The latter one containing the supplier's website address.
- In order to be able to generate year reports, at the start of a year he copies the previous year's file, removes all records from it and starts using that as the new year's file. (This year, he accidentally created a shortcut instead of copying...)
- Some tables have a misterious column called "#1". It always contains a 1.
- The system consists of about 20 files, each of them containing a single table, although only 10 of them are really used. The other ones are just legacy.
- File, table, column, and layout names are capitalized randomly (all caps, no cap, starting uppercase) and are usually abbreviations, like "st2", "oms3", "off\rek", "b", "VERDBEST6" and "antst".
- One table has 92 columns.
- Of those 92 columns, only about 20, maybe 30, are in use.

Now, my task is finding out what parts are useful and in use, extracting those and create a baby monster out of the giant monster this system has become.

Sidenote: I actually enjoy having to learn a bit about accounting in order to understand this. Planning to use the knowledge I gain to keep track of my own finances.

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

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

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

Sorry you Indian guys ;-)

Dear intellectual crew, your double-digit IQ little shitposter needs your help.

The situation in Russia is always bad and it will always become worse and worse. In addition to that, it's illegal to have medications that can potentially cure me. Add 15 sunny days a year in my city and it becomes clear that I need to leave.

However, despite the absolute lack of sunny days, I FUCKING LOVE my city, Saint-Petersburg. When I was living in Moscow for like six months, I liked Moscow but I was missing my city every single day. Sometimes I forgot that I'm not in St. Petersburg anymore, tried to figure out what street I'm on, realized that I'm in Moscow and felt like I'm physically suffocating. I always miss my city so bad.

I'm not going to talk about why do I love it so much. If I ever start, I'm going to write a book about it.

Questions are:
1. Is it Stockholm syndrome? I don't miss Russia and don't identify myself as Russian. I only miss one city and I wasn't even born here.
2. How do I leave in that mental state?

This is the only problem that is holding me. Money, finding a place to stay and finding a job I can approach rationally, but my problem I can not.

The more I learn about programming the more terrified I become about having huge knowledge gaps and learning something wrong by possibly making wrong assumptions about how certain things work or by falling on bad tutorials. I'm constantly hyped about coding, and at the same time I always feel I will never be able to say confidently "I know how to code".
How the hell do you make sure you are learning programming correctly as a self taught? Or do i just have to accept that no matter how and what I code there will always be a better way to do it, resulting in me constantly feeling as a low-skilled coder?

Our company is cheap, cheap as fuck. We have to use some third-party platforms and every year they choose something that is slightly cheaper than the other. (like a few $ per annual), they do not know that we have to refactor our code at the backend because the changes of the platform.

It doesn't end there, they even look for devs from third world countries to work for them remotely instead of hiring permanent staff (I understand it is cheaper because of currency difference and etc), but what about the training period or to let them become comfortable with the existing system, even when he/she is a genius... it takes time to be productive at work.

The worst part is they dont give a shit, they think devs can be replaced easily just like some construction workers carrying stuffs on site (no offence to them), management treating people like shit and doesn't care when they leave.

On Skype.
[tldr: #muhPrivacy;]

You know, people hiring via Skype.
Gaming, seeing family or having long range relationships.

It's become a decent tool.

Then there is the Skype employee.
Opening a court case because in his work time, evaluating Skype calls - ON FUCKING OBSERVING SKYPING PEOPLE - he has to look at too much flesh (as in porn) for his salary level.
Like : the payment category states that you gotta be classed like 1,2 salary categories higher for such work.

So the first instance did not recognise the employees case, because they said its a state thing, or even higher.
Later instance evaluated the employee was right and decreed Microsoft / the NSA (whomever direct employees they are) to properly categorize their employees.
Therefore cost relatively exploded and an algorithm to detect nudity was built.
Wich is operational way earlier than Skypes TOS renewal mid 2018.
That also bans bad language and auto bans given accounts.

Talking about social credit..
in PROC (or prod, as they're known).
And btw: complaining about Google while posting Christmas gatherings on Instagram.. You get what I mean.

Honestly, I don't recall the sources. It's been a while.

I'd really appreciate a little compendium of this for historical reasons.

They will ask: what has brought us here? What is everyone an ultimate right/left/center/agnostic/religious fascist?

And we'll have it on paper. Or papyrus,.. even stone. As I don't know how far mighty people will go for their fortune.

It's my end of probation and I just got demoted, from originally "Senior dev" to "dev".

My manager found it a bit difficult to tell me but funny enough, I am completely fine with it apart from the little dent on my pay check. Let me talk about the bad first: money. I believe I have been on the lower end of the market pay range anyways so this step-back gives me about 5% cut, which is acceptable and fair enough.

And the good? Quite a bit. When I got this job offer 6 months ago, it was when everything literally went to shit. I was upset with a somehow not so smart but stubborn tech lead and I desperately wanted to quit. Then I got the offer, which even after 2 interviews I still didn't recall it was a job ads for "technical lead". The manager thought I was not there yet but wanted to keep me as a senior dev. Then, this pandemic almost took away this job. My manager brought my case to the CEO and convinced him to keep me, by saying a lot of good things about me (which I think might not be true for the tech side...)

Throughout the whole 6 months I have been working remotely from home. WFH is not new to me, just this time it's very challenging as I was starting a new job. I have been struggling to keep my pace. All people in the team are nice. However if I don't reach out, no one would notice I need help. And with zero knowledge for this job, I got stuck with "I don't know what I don't know". This ranges from company culture, practice, new tech.. everything. So, that's how this 6 months feels long, but also short.

In our review meeting I think my manager finally realise this. Otherwise he would have gone for the "terminate employment" option. Taking away the "senior" title also takes away the expectation of "I should know XYZ", which I don't. I told him I am kinda happy with it because this sets me up for a more comfortable position to catch my breathe. He told me he noticed my improvement along the way. I told him yes I have been putting in efforts but just given the situation it's not as quick as anyone would expect. We're on the same page now.

So compared to my previous job, I got paid less. But in return, I get many more opportunities to expose myself to new tech. I get a good team who are respectful and open-minded. This is exactly what I was looking for and the drive for me to quit my previous job.

Not to mention I got a reality check. This is also an indicator for me starting to become an imposter, which is the thing I despise most in the industry. I don't want people to value me for how many years I have got in my career. I want to prove myself by what I am capable of. If I'm not there, I should and will get there.

And the last thing which I'm not very keen but it's 100% worth mentioning, is that my manager said I should aim for taking the "senior" role back. He said the salary raise is waiting when I get there. But... Let me just take my time.

Working on what you love may be the most dangerous trap i have ever been told.

Why? You may work on what you love, but for a person that you don't. This will be the most thing that you will encounter on your career. I have been programming since i was 11 and my passion was sucked by my jobs.

And that's why all of my other hobbies will ever become a job, no matter how much people think i am good at it, the only reason i am good at my hobbies is because i don't do it for a living.

You can work on what you love, but don't expect expressing yourself at your job.

There is the Entrepreneurship route, where, instead of sucking your own passion, you should be sucking your employees passion, if you are doing it right.

The Last Rodeo

Hi dear ranters. I've been a dev since I was 12, that makes 18 freakin years. Although I love my job and being someone who not only consumes but also produces, I am a bit grown tired of the industry.

About 6 years ago I cut ties from the last agency I worked with to become a freelancer. I ignited many projects, helped many of my customers (still helping most of them) to realize their goals. But I've come to realize that my country doesn't like old school laborers like myself (for some reasons I would explain if asked).

So I've been thinking: what would I do if I wasn't doing this job? What would you do for living if you were to stop being a developer? Let's have a chat.

What's with all this micro-certification nonsense that seems to plague the industry? Does anyone actually give a shit that I may have passed some vendor's five day bootcamp?

Apparently I can now have a trophy (virtual, of course) if I complete X online MS courses.

Some of these courses seem to focus on stuff that has no use in day-to-day work.

And I have to actually pay because I learned your product and then pay to maintain the cert in some cases. WTF?!

I can see why the vendors do it---I like free money too---but why have we even let this become a thing.

It's like collecting baseball cards.

I despair of what our industry has become...I really do.

Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.

Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.

I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.

Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.

Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.

Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.

So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.

Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.

I actually do have one. 2 years ago I found myself in a stressful situation. It lasted for an hour or so but all ended well. Ever since that incident I was wondering what should be different so that situations like these could be avoided. I had an idea. I began making sketches, sorting out the architecture I'd need and then it hit me. Shit, I could reuse this very principle for a MUCH larger scale! And in fact there's noone in the market offering this yet! There are similar products, products that offer a tiny part of my idea's functionality, but none of them are even close to what I have in mind!

And so the coding began. I was still a student back then. And employed 12hrs/day. And married. Needless to say I did not have much time for coding. Now I'm also a father (although not a student any more!) which makes my schedule even worse.

All in all I've made quite a few widely reusable libraries by now which have saved me 10s of thousands of lines typing, had yet another idea on alternative TLS which seems impossible to crack (well okay, possible. But there's a twist - cracker will not be able to know he cracked the algo :) ). Now I'm close to 100k LOC of my main project and struggling with a fucking FE (since I'm more of a bkend guy). FE's already taken a few months from me and I'm still in a square 1 :/ But I'm moving forward. Slowly, but moving. Frustrated af, but not giving up.

I had a sort of a dream to start my project before I'm 30. I have less than a year left. Still doable. This project, if it's sucessful, has a potential to become extremely popular as it offers solutions to multiple problems we have today. This project should save me from 9-to-5 work every day where, no matter how great the environment is, I feel trapped. But I need money to survive in this city . With my family.
This project should be a solution to all of my problems and probably something great the world could enjoy.

I wish I could make it. I really do. I don't want to be 9-5 any more. I don't want to be dictated what's my schedule, what's that I have to do now. what to think. I want to be free of all of this. Have enough time to live. To travel, see the world. Live in a house (God I miss living in a house....). Spend time with my family. Show my lil boy what a wonderful thing the World is!

I really want this to work. I want to be free again. And I wish I hadn't to deal with FrontEnd.

Allright, enough wabbling. Time for a nice cup of tea and back to coding. "The next big thing" is not going to create itself while I'm ranting, right?

Any chance we can do a polling system?

@dfox

I studied anthropology and ive been in this community for almost 2 years. Have discovered the coding landscape at pretty much the same time and i must say its an interesting bunch of people.

I came on here to learn about the geek way and how to become a better dev. Seeing the rants has been really helpful!

But i think the polling system could lead to interesting understanding. Of the community both for your own app (for marketing bullshit purposes) but also for us.

Id love to know what kind of music people listen to but in a summarized way rather than a unending list of comments which will be harder to extract the information from!

more of my favorite "about" sections from various users:

Jilano
"nothing."

Humble like a monk.

kindawonderful
"This user likes to keep secrets about himself."

Aw, hes shy!

molaram
"Part time evil corporation hater & armed infidel trying to blow off some steam."

Is that you Elliot?

dmonkey
"Computer Science student and Math lover."

Your love of math is suspect. I have not seen you participate in any of my math shitposting.

And under his skills
"I was ending up becoming a front-end developer, now I'm thinking to become a farmer after uni."

The total state of frontend in 2021. "Fuck it, I'd rather shovel horse shit than learn another
framework!"

Have you tried Horseshit.JS for that?

What about shove.js?

No one will understand me but you Devs.
I am a self taught developer who works in a digital marketing agency, when I was learning to code I wanted that the code I will produce will help people and make me happy, the only job i got is in digital marketing agency, because no one in my country will recrute a self taught bald ugly mid thirty fucker, then want them young and fresh, anyway, I proved that I can handle the job, so that I became the only dev in the agency.
the problem is that I reached a that checkpoint where I have to choose a path:
- I learned Node and React but I can't use them in my agency
- I work with wordpress and prestashop but I don't code, I use fucking theme forest templates

the only way to work with MERN is through remote, but I am not a senior yet, I only have to keep learning PHP but I can't advance in my current job since the projects don't require coding, and I feel that my agency will close the dev department because they put me in the designers office.

I don't want to reach 40 with nothing in my portfolio but shitty theme forest template rape, the stress from my current situation is killing me, I can't even start working on my portfolio website and blog because I can't think straight, my mind jump from "today I will build an api" to "no I need to build a custom wordpress theme" each 3 minutes, I don't sleep, the futur is dark, I am afraid that if I focus on wordpress and shit I will miss working in interesting projects, and if I focus on MERN I will never gain experience localy to become a full remote later.

many will agree with me that PHP is shitty but gets the work done, and I hate PHP because of prestashop, and we only live once, the only other job I found require wordpress and fucking prestashop, imagine living a live doing something you don't like, then die regretting every decision you make.

I might sound crazy for you, but I don't have many friends and I am an introvert working with designers and community managers ... so this is the only place I can write what I want.

if you reached here, I thank you for your time

You know, one of my fav ranters constantly shits on one of my main languages :P which is Java. But shit I would lie if I said that I have not learned something from what he has to say. Truth be told I am aware of the pitfalls and bad design decissions of a lot of my favorite langs: Python, PHP, JS, Java, Go etc. And I think it is benefitial to everyone to understand the things that our fav stacks fail at doing in order to become better devs.

So lets give a round of applause to those angry mofockas that make us see the shit that is wrong with what we use and learn more from each other.

As someone deeply questioning their life and career choices as of now, I wouldn't want to become a dev anymore because:
- you spend most of your time burning your eyes on a monitor and getting terrible back pain
- you might sell your soul to company benefits whose only purpose is to make you distracted from the fact that you're basically spending 1/3 of the day wishing you were doing something you actually want to do
- might have to do some exhausting communication ooga boogas to understand what supervisors and your other colleagues want to say (in a small company setting)
- again, as in my previous rant, if you're not on some less disposable dev position, you could as well become something else given that junior salaries are not that high
- get into an unhealthy work world where little hours of sleep, overworking, and other such unhealthy lifestyles are praised or used to determine your worth

Of course, these differ on a case by case basis. I'd become a train driver or something if I still didn't have to eat and not throw more money at a career change
Life's tough

Those GDPR nag screens actually are more damaging than useful. Nobody has the energy to jump through the hoops all different sites set up for you to opt-out of tracking. Yet you will constantly see those pages if you have opted out.

If you use some privacy extensions that block tracking cookies and stuff, you will keep getting those nag screens, because they have no idea whether you have seen it or not (because of no tracking)

So browsing the web has become the constant of:

1) Search something
2) Deal with nagscreens
3) See the page
4) Go to other page
5) Repeat from step two

I wonder what this will lead to? People are less likely to visit random pages and stick to ones they have account on? Will darknet become more popular? Will somebody design some standard way to get rid of this nagscreen wave?

Rant about myself. When in a group situation where there is a very dominant coworker either related to skill or status with management. I always start out contributing ideas but after realizing my ideas are dumb or just dismissed I stop trying and just fade into the background and do what I am told. I also become detached from the project and start putting my energy into learning or side projects. I feel like such a wimp and pushover. I get told I don't have passion.

When I told my mother I wanted to become a software dev, she went surprised but supported me to reach my goals. That's what family does. I'll always be thankful to her. (My family is quite short actually).

One year later, with my first salary I bought her a brand new iPad. 💕

If you don't have your family support, just do it. Do whatever makes you happy and complete!

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

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

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

I like js and node in general.
But there's this thing I hate about NodeJs...

The blogs. The goddamn blogs.

Every goddamn blog post. Is code. Dozens of lines of code.

Oh, so you want X feature? Just copy paste this shit.

I swear to god, blog posts are the source versioning system to these people.

What they should instead is
a) Create a package.
b) Add tests to it.
c) Present the package to the reader with some minimal code.

But I'm a getting a huge impression that node blog writers want you to copy the code in their post, paste it in your project, and be happy with it.

Now, I'm not assuming that every person posting in medium.com is a software engineer (and by engineer I mean an engineer, not some fuckwad who begs for github stars on dev communities).

The problem to me is that they fucking SATURATE the goddamn search results.

The same goes for finding an npm package for your need, because there are so many low quality packages it's saturated too, you have too plow this stinking pile of projects that have very low quality,
and there's not a really good npm finder out there. Half of them are dead, some look and load like shit, and npm search has a low barrier for good code.

Me on rails, OTOH "ok, I need this thing", I google that and I swear to [-∞,+∞] I find GOOD packages, well designed, no cookie cutter bullshit, no obscure marketing shit on the README.md, it is very clear what this shit does, and the api is designed for HUMANS.
and it actually takes very little time to know if there's no such package.

I don't have to read dozens of fucking my-fuck-blog.io (jesus christ, the io domain has become such a fucking joke, it got fucking abused to death, there are some cool sites out there using it, but my god, James H. Marketing likes to just absorb everything he can, and the internet was not going to be a fucking exception)

does all of this make sense?

Anyone else here with anxieties, depression or what-not? I feel this could get heavy, but I feel this is the only place I could write this. So...

My 18-month-long programming course is slowly coming to an end. Time has come for us to be sent out to job interviews at various companies.
Every single time an interview comes up, I feel the exact same mix of my inconfidence, constant anxiety, "I'm gonna throw up", impatience and whatever else is there in my head. I figured it would get easier with each consecutive interview but it hasn't.
The questions they ask make me sick. The atmosphere is unfathomable. Robots are more humane.

- Why do you want to work with us?
I need money for my meds and something to down them with? I willingly put myself through this shit to become a corporate slave, what else is there to say? I can only hope I'll be writing any code here.

- Where do you see yourself in 2-3 years?
Far away from anything remotely related to an HR department of any sort?

- Had you been a fruit, which one would you be? Whatever would come out of my tears blended with semen? What the fuck is even that question?

Of course those aren't my actual responses, but conjuring the IRL ones to finish the process is a serious burden. And those are only some HR ones. After this barrage of questions they want my lifeless, flaccid body to write code. I mean ok, it's a software dev gig, but I already gave all I had on self-clairvoyance.

We'll be in touch!

Is there a strategy you guys have when you go to an interview? Any tips for taming the acrid beast running around in your brain? Is it too much to talk with a human in a humane language without "15 buzzwords to make the recruiter moist"?

Since memes have become an integral part of our community, I propose a way to handle them without affecting the actual Ranters.

Everyone adding a meme or a gag picture can do so under a particular tag, and the Algo can handle your meme needs by exposing you to that particular tag based on your activity with such posts.

Or you could just make the users search for memes if they wanted to see them.

This could also be done vice versa by ranters using a RANT tag, I would keep my RANT filter on so anything without that tag won't show up

To make it better you can provide a sort of suggested tags option :

|gag|¦¦¦|meme|¦¦¦Ranf|¦¦ scroll to the right for more... Kinda thing

@dfox @trogus please tell us what you think about this

I'm fed up with you guys ranting about what you SHOULD HAVE said, but instead just walked out, said something cowardly, or nothing at all...

For fuck sake, grow a pair and stand up for yourself! Noone else will...

I get it, this place is a nice vent, people understand, it's not face-to-face, it's easy. But the sheer number of you that had a clear chance to be grow, and ran for the door is alarming.

I also get it, it's mostly difficult to talk back to a client/boss/professor. But there's a few steps between FUCK YOUR FUCKING DIPSHIT FACE and running to the corner to post a rant here.

Find the right words. You don't have to sware, be civilized, but take a stand, present your arguments, present facts and proofs. Don't give in to their scare tactics, earn that respect you need and deserve! Then come here like a winner and share it with us.

It has become quite a tradition here to sware in all caps and then say that's what you should have said, but didn't. From now on, I'm -- these posts to give my two cents in an attempt to make this a community of winners ranting about a stupid world. Not a community of cowards ranting how world is scary.

The everything is Data science craze trend.

Honestly it's not even sustainable with every kid and their grandmother wanting to be data scientists because it's a 'passion' and a 'dream job' and all of that click bait stuff.

It's just become ridiculous at this point and I doubt we'll even have the long awaited 'breakthroughs' people have been talking about for so long.

Also I have a strong feeling everyone thinks it's their 'passion' because it tops the lists of highest paid jobs out there and everyone thinks with 3 months of training they're a fully fledged data scientist because some Python or R package implements all the algorithms he could ever think of using.

Add to that the fact that most advertised data science jobs are actually data engineering where you maintain a date store and that's it.

Agree or disagree that's my piece and if you can convince me otherwise I'll be surprised because I've been subscribed to this idea for so long that it lost me some real good opportunities because I thought it was just what I was meant to be doing which turned to be false after I thought about it. There's a million other jobs that are more impactful and with pursuing.

Everybody is criticizing Microsoft for leaving too much legacy code in Windows, etc., but let me tell you that I prefer 100% that and have lifetime backward compatibility than having to deal with Google bullshit.

Google sucks ass.
It's one of the most dev unfriendly company on this planet (along with Facebook).

You can't fucking change BASIC stuff in Android SDK every fucking version.
You just can't!

You can't use a system of "PERMISSIONS" each developer has to set in its application and each user has to accept during the installation, that a few versions later become USELESS... because "Hmmm… no, It's not enough, let's make a new privileged permission that makes the old one fucking worthless".

YOU FUCKING, TOXIC, BASTARDS.

It's my app, my code, my device, my fucking conditions. If I want to install viruses on my device, I should be able to do it.
I shouldn't have to call fucking Sundar fucking Pichai fucking CEO of fucking GOOGLE.

USERS != BABIES.
DEVS != CRIMINALS

We are the reason you have a fucking job, fucking food on your fucking table.

I want a fucking GOD_MODE permission in the next SDK, assholes!

You can't REMOVE fucking "Android.OS.getSerial()" making it only for system apps.
It's not sensible data… and if It's in your opinion, you've already created a "android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE", so what else do you want, fucking asshole?
Right, you want to introduce "android.permission.READ_PRIVILIGED_PHONE_STATE" to make obsolete the other one, son of a bitch!

I don't fucking use you're garbage Google Play Store, no worries! I won't upload my app on your servers, bitch!

They've created a monopoly in the industrial space (PDAs) and they keep making fucking wrong decisions every single year.

My job is already stressful, why you can't just stop making it worse? fml

What do computers and air conditioners have in common?

They both become useless when you open windows.

Saying that, I use a Windows machine

I despise it when software developers remove features because "too few people use them".

Is this what those shady telemetry features are for? So they can pick which useful features to get rid of because some computer rookies whined that it is "feature creep" rather than just ignoring it?

Now I have to fear losing useful (or at least occasionally convenient) features each time I upgrade, such as Firefox ditching RSS, FTP, and the ability to view individual cookies. The third can be done with an extension, but compatibility for it might be broken at some point, so we have to wait for someone to come up with a replacement.
Also, the performance analysis tool in the developer tools has been moved to an online service ("Firefox profiler"). I hope I don't need to explain the problems with that.

But perhaps the biggest plunge in functionality in web browser history was Opera version 15. That was when they ditched their native "Presto" browsing engine for Chromium/Blink, and in the process removed many features including the integrated session manager and page element counter.

The same applies to products such as smartphones. In the early 2010s, it was a given that a new smartphone should cover all the capabilities of its predecessors in its series, so users can upgrade without worrying a second that anything will be missing. But that blissful image was completely destroyed with the Galaxy S6. (There have been some minor feature removals before that, such as the radio and the three-level video recording bitrate adjustment on the S4, but that's nothing compared to what was removed with the S6.).

Whenever I update software to a new version or upgrade my smartphone, I would like it to become MORE capable, not LESS (and to hell with that "less is more" nonsense).

We have this one professor in a mathematics course.
He sits there having no plan of what he's doing. He literally opens his python Jupiterbook with latex enabled, writes a complex equation and tries to solve it in 10 minutes. Makes mistakes every few steps and deletes his formatted equation that isn't even interpreted yet (we see the cdot etc. instead of * which makes it even harder to read). Every few minutes some student corrects him and he deletes it again.

Why can't you just think first and then write and try to teach us?
Use as much time as you want as long as you don't have to keep reverting back the humanly unreadable latex equation.

Hell, you are also allowed to use a basic pen and paper. Trust me, that shit is more readable, even if you have a bad handwriting, than your squeezed in complex untranslated latex equation in Jupiterbook.

Btw. he also streams with no zooming in I might add.

Am I supposed to trying to read your small as shit, focus on what you're teaching while you keep making mistakes or write it down on paper and practice the given tasks?

On top of that, he records the zoom conference but he doesn't share it anywhere on the college forum so that people who have missed it can download it and rewatch it.

Everything he does makes no sense. How did he become a mathematics professor with a PhD?

I tried LSD yesterday!

Backstory: I have a weird combo of bipolar type 1 and autism. During the day, my brain works inconsistently. Here how my day usually goes:
09:00. I wake up. Uninterested, cold, masculine. No thoughts in the background. No OCD.
12:00. Brain warms up. Thought process begins. Thoughts are short in their length
14:00. Thoughts start to get longer. Stress starts to accumulate. Background thoughts start, now typically 2–3 at a time.
16:00. Twitching begins. Thought chains are now 5–6 concepts long, one following the other. Perception level rises quickly. I start to feel more feminine. It is in this state that I start to spot imperfections and mistakes looking at code or text without reading it. I see it like a painting, and mistakes appear as “visually wrong” parts. This does not depend on formatting.
17:00. OCD becomes more severe. I HAVE to touch all the surfaces around me, evenly, as if my hands were text highlighters, and I had to paint everything evenly, without overlaps or spots that are brighter or darker than the others. Some surface textures become irritating, and feel quite unpleasant to the touch. If I go for a run now, like 3 km or so, I feel somewhat relieved.
18:00. Things are getting serious. Creativity levels through the roof. I speak in long, never-ending, profound sentences. Background and foreground thoughts almost become one. I appear visually drunk and happy, despite never drinking alcohol. Femininity rises even further. Sometimes, when I speak to a small group of people, especially if I go with friends to meet new people, and we go to some bar, new people ask to record my voice or to write down whatever I’m saying. To be honest, this reason alone is a huge boost to how I see yourself.
19:00. OCD is crazy now. Surfaces have soul.
21:00 <— Gotta take my meds and go to sleep here to prevent what comes at 22:00
22:00. All thoughts, both foreground and background, fully became one. Now my brain officially disobeys me and thinks on its own, and I can ride it like a surfer at best. Twitching becomes concerning. I develop a 1000-yard stare. I am officially a female. Physical strength is somewhat enhanced. Pain tolerance lowered significantly.
23:00. Derealization begins. The world around me appears two-dimensional and flat, like a picture. It is hard to get home on foot, even in close (less than one km) proximity. Brain is fully numb. All that thought monstrosity that was building up is just noise now. Zero “flops” available to think about something I want to think about, like how much money I have on me or what time it is.

I go to sleep. I see nightmares. I wake up, and the cycle repeats.

Contrary to a popular opinion, I never take any “brain-boosting” meds like antidepressants, and I think now you can see why. I consume neither alcohol nor caffeine. Neither me, nor my doctors want my brain to explode. I only take lamotrigine that helps to “lower down” mania, and quetiapine, a neuroleptic, that slows down my brain, like a neuroleptic. Both are there to slow down my brain, to kinda “throttle” my brain like a CPU to cool it down.

That said, 100ug of LSD just… brought me my usual 18:00 state, but in the morning?

All that small-dose recreational ordeal? The thing that helps people feel more energetic and creative?

People pay money… for that? To feel the way I feel every evening?

I've played 46000 battles in WorldofTanks.
avg battle time: 10 minutes
Total minutes: 460000
Total hours: 7666.66
Total days: 319 days of gameplay!

Now I just wonder had I invested all that time to code what I could have become by now.

I have couple dev ambitions some of them are:
- to become better in what I am doing and get a higher position.
- to build my own product.
- to educate young programmers.

In game development feature creep tends to kill games because it's just as much about what's NOT there as what IS there.

Take The Last of Us for example. Would a strategic tower defense segment make sense? No? And if it was a *hugely* popular mechanic at the time of development is there a real chance they would have included such a segment in TLOU? Yes.

Don't just believe me. Go take a look at what happened to the original Fortnite versus the hills-have-eyes inbred offspring that it became all because PUBG and its format were cancerously mega popular at the time.

That's why while developing my game Atom Ranger (now with 100% less multiplayer!), a mix between metro and don't starve, I spent six years *pruning* features. You can click my referral link and get 50% off the opportunity to become an unpaid tester of the pre-prealpha right now, "for hardcore players only!" (Tm)

My game:

Took dad's phone in hand to find out a contact number and realised that his phone has become quite slow to respond.
Asked him why is that and he didn't answer my question and said that he has got a message that Airtel is giving away free 4G Sims.
Bewildered, I asked him so what is that supposed to do with his phone being slow and he said, "If we take the 4G sim, then won't that make my phone faster? I have heard that 4G is fastest network".
And my reaction was like

I worked really hard to make this girl my friend at work. We go for morning breaks around from 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM.

And then this new guy joined the company sitting close to me and we become friends. This new guy finds my girl friend really awesome and they are getting closer everyday and they are leaving me behind now and separates me with almost all the conversations during morning break meet.

Today, during the morning break. My girl friend said that I have changed and don't talk to her much like I used to. Way back when we met I really clearly told her that I have anxiety and social disorder so please bare with me and she told me that she will be there for me as a good friend.

I'm not sure what to do. I'm going to lose a good friend really soon.

'nother "teacher" story here.

Little background knowledge: I'm repeating the things he told us about at home and try to learn them by myself. I use the newest Visual studio and .NET framework version.
In school we have pretty old PC's and even older .NET framework. But let this insanity begin...

As normally i entered my classroom a little late (I have a dangerous habit of ignoring my alarms) and sat down on my chair. We were only 3 people including me at that moment so everything was pretty chill. I ask him what our task was and something along these lines occurred:
Me: what's our task?
Teacher: you remember your shopping list program? I want a textbox in it next to the listview and I want it to show every listview item
Me: that doesn't make sense
Teacher: yadda yadda just do it
Me: kaaaaay, anything else?
Teacher: actually yes! Please use inheritance.
Me: *baffeld* that doesn't make any sense at all. We have 5 different fruits; you tell me i should make a class per fruit!?
Teacher: yes of course! This is how professionals do it all the time. Please give them a distinct attribute, too.
Me: *angry* I'm. Not. Gonna. Do. This. This is total bullshit and also really bad coding style. I'm not going to teach myself something that doesn't make sense at all.
(Note: i know how inheritance works and he knows that too)
Teacher: You have to do it, you won't be prepared for final exams otherwise!
Me: leave my exam prep to me. I won't do this.
Teacher: *grumbles* fine

Later that very same lesson i got a .NET compatibility error. I couldn't work because I wasn't allowed to change anything on the installation nor to install a newer framework. So basically he told me I should've used 'sharpdevelopment' (which is not able to do windows Forms, but hey who cares) and this would not have happened. I was so furious at that moment i just took all my stuff, told him that I work 'from a place where i got decent software and space to think' and left the room.

Why did this person decide to become a programming teacher?

That sad moment you get your laptop at 11:30 in the evening and automatically you type github.com. What have I become!?

It's not that big of a deal, but it's kinda embarrassing since I was one of the best students in the class.

Took a web design (HTML, CSS & a tiny bit of JS) class. I never really struggled; more like polished everything I already knew to become a bit better.

In class working on an assignment. So we have a folder dedicated on a server just for this class. The folder is accessible as long as you're on the school internet or using the VPN. So I have an assignment there. I drop it onto my desktop, because i had worked on it since the last time I was at this computer.

I opened the project in VSCode and begin making changing things. I opened the HTML file wasn't updating. "That's odd" I thought. Cleared the cache, opened and closed the browser. Still nothing. I called the professor over to see if had any clue what was going on.

My dumbass self was editing the file that was on my desktop, but I had opened the HTML file from the server. I felt so stupid but we both just laughed it off and went on.

This week I got a promotion after being a junior for a year. Boss said Im a medior now and my monthly salary raised with 400 euro per month

Feels good but what feels bad is that a coworker of mine which has been contracted recently without any development experience is still making 400 more a month..

The thing is that this "developer" wanted to become a Java developer, he has been given time during work to study Java and in the meanwhile join the team thats working on a saas product (my team, where im lead dev)

During the 3 months ive counted a maximum of 10 commits and i was done with him which conflicted in a very bad vibe at the office.

During a refinement I asked if everybody understood what needs to be done, no questions asked. Next day when i was working at a clients office on another project 9 am i git a Skype message "Can you tell me What to do? I have no idea" where I replied "you should have asked me yesterday, i am not going to help you unless u come up with a question that makes sense.. what have u tried urself?".. Well then he got mad and stopped doing what he was trying to do.

The next morning i talked with him and we agreed to have a 1hour session to talk him through the user story. When we were done, he said that he understood and was going to work on it.

Next day I check, no commits, so during stand up i confronted hmj with this and he admitted hes been lacking and wanted to talk with the boss and me after stand up.

Well he admitted things were going to fast to keep up for him because he is doing some sysadmin stuff aswell.. the plan of becoming a Java dev was now history and he left the team..

Now he is just doing some sysadmin stuff but its been 3 days that hes been saying today ill setup a tomcat on the servers and give you SSH acces to deploy your .war files, today I finally gained access but he couldnt figure out how to move the war to the webapps folder.. And i wasnt allowed to transfer it to there..

I started writing code at a young age, nodding games, building websites, modifying hex files, hacking etc... I started my career off tho in highschool writing embedded code for a local medical robotics company, and also got tasked with building the mobile app to control these robots and use them for diagnostics, etc.... this was before the App bubble, before there was app degree and that bullshit.. anyway graduated highschool, went to college to get a comp sci degree.
Wanted to teach for the university and research AI...

well I dropped out of college after 3 years, cuz I spent more time at work than in class. (I was a software consultant) in the auto industry in Detroit. I wasn’t learning anything I didn’t already know or could learn from books or a quick google search.
I also didn’t like the approach professors and the department taught software... way none of the kids had a good foundation of what the fuck they were doing... and everyone relied on the god damn IDEs... so I said fuck it and dropped out after getting in plenty of arguments with the professors and department leads.

I probably should have choose CE .. but whatever CS imo still needs a solid CE/EE foundation without it, 30 years from now I fear what will become of the industry of electronics... when all current gen folks are retired and nobody to write the embedded code, that literally ALLLLL consumer electronics runs on. Newer generations don’t understand pointers, proper memory management etc.

So I combined both passion AI and knowledge of software in general and embedded software, and been working on my career in the auto industry without a degree, never looked back.

Why has web development become so complicated?

I'm learning React with JSX . Why is JSX even necessary? HTML works fine. Its simple and gets the job done.

I can't stand the node_modules directory either. Opening it up reveals what seems like hundreds it not thousands of dependencies that all have their own recursive node_modules folder and the dependencies continue.

Why are we creating more unnecessary abstractions on top of more unnecessary abstractions? What happened to K.I.S.S?

What was wrong with vanilla Javascript and becoming great at that and using just that?

I remember the first time I downloaded smth from the internet and was extremely nervous not to fuck anything up. I was young and had just started using a computer. It was a desktop computer with windows xp in our basement, inside kind of its own wardrobe, standalone.
I remember my dad (not very tech-savvy) who told me not to download anything from the internet, as it would surely be a virus, but I was bored of the built-in programs and wanted to try it out. I downloaded a program and was extremely nervous and hoped for no virus. I don't remember what I installed back then (no virus/trojan/etc.😅) but it was this moment I realised I could download anything and wasn't tied to what the OS provided, which led me to be interested in computers in general.
I believe that if I hadn't attempted that download, I wouldn't have become the tech-savvy person that I am today, studying CS...

A few years ago I would whine, complain and rant about shitty software, which I knew could be so much better than it was. But I didn't yet write software of my own.

Now I complain about shitty libraries, API's and users. Not much has changed really. And every time I write code, I curse myself, and whoever made this trashpile I have to work with. I curse the user to the moon and beyond for using the program wrong. Funny thing is, exactly the thing I was complaining about (input validation, see earlier rant) is also exactly what no more than 5 minutes after release, a user fucked up with. The bot just does not respond at this point. But fuck these braindead retards for users.

In a few years I expect myself to be complaining about shitty compilers and buffer overflows, segmentation violations, bad coding style (don't make your program a fucking colander kthx), and so on.

Next decade I expect myself to be complaining about physics itself, and why the universe is governed by the laws it's governed by. Whoever this God is, he's a fucking retard. Funny thing is, the signs for it are already there. Electron theory! If only those electrons were positrons, then the math would check out properly. Instead of negative electrons traveling from negative to positive, we'd have positive positrons traveling from positive to negative. At least from what I understand so far, this is still a decade away after all.

The point I'm trying to make is that nothing changes, only my understanding of the world around me does, as I tumble further and further down the rabbit hole. Sometimes I wish I had taken the blue pill... Either complain about others' software or perhaps not give a shit at all. Become one of those filthy users I now despise.

huge confession bear...

i just learned what set -e does in bash

i've been using logical and (&&) this whole time

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

i have become what i hate 🤡🤡🤡

I don’t just want to learn how to scrap together applications.

I want to become an engineer; one that can wear that badge properly.

I spent a day or two reading my peers code base in .NET Core to start learning its wizarding ways. I found myself emulating some of the patterns.

Then I found a tutorial series on putting together a correctly decoupled RESTful API...the same chap wrote an SDK for Azure CosmoDB.

THIS is what I am talking about.

I can’t believe these guys at work have twenty years C# experience between them and they are churning out this shit for more than 1.5x my salary.

I want to become this but I swear half the coding world does NOT care.

Think I am going to try out my first stuff for my game engine in 2D. The games I have the most fond memories of were 2D. Sure I like what has happened on the 3D side. But it would be fun to recreate some of my favorite 2D games. Except with one caveat: procedural generation. Never play the same game twice. For testing purposes I will have a seed system to regenerate the same worlds. I would have played these games so much longer if they had been based on a seed for generation of content.

I also like the idea of weapons and armor never being exactly the same. Sure they can look similar, but on close inspection you could see differences. It will be fun to start with base models and then add imperfections and differences.

Another issue I have with fantasy games is always leveling up the weapon by buying something better. Sure we have improvement systems though smithing and magic, but some weapons are always better than others. I wanted to have a game where weapons could be improved by usage and upgrades. Kill 1000 trolls and the weapon gets imbued with trollbane. Kill a dragon and the blood infuses and it deals fire damage. So a player could start out with the family sword and end up with a god tier weapon at the end of the game. Make weapons become legendary. Not because it has more power, but because trolls recognize the blade and the wielder and are scared shitless.

Terrain in 2D should be a lot easier to generate. Weapons, armor, etc should be easier to modify and generate. This should give me the grounding I need to develop the algorithms for a future 3D system. Godot is currently stronger in 2D than 3D. That will change in the next couple of years as more focus is put on the engine. There is no reason I cannot experiment with mixing 2D and 3D as well.

Holy shit, I was just thinking I cannot imagine the amazing shit they could have done with the games I played as a kid with 2D physics!

Haha, something they had in the older games was actual gambling. You could bet on monster fights and slot machines in game. I wonder if that takes a hard hit with ESRB now?

Currently stuck in tutorial hell. Learning how the engine works and seeing what features are available. I get more excited each video I watch. The engine is packed with goodies and the addons are crazy good.

tldr: First project will be short game in 2D. Will explore procedural content.

Dev Diary Entry #56
Dear diary, the part of the website that allows users to post their own articles - based on an robust rights system - through a rich text editor, is done! It has a revision system and everything. Now to work on a secure way for them to upload images and use these in their articles, as I don't allow links to external images on the site.

Dev Diary Entry #57
Dear diary, today I finally finished the image uploading feature for my website, and I have secured it as well as I can.

First, I check filesize and filetype client-side (for user convenience), then I check the same things serverside, and only allow images in certain formats to be uploaded.

Next, I completely disregard the original filename (and extension) of the image and generate UUIDs for them instead, and use fileinfo/mimetype to determine extension. I then recreate the image serverside, either in original dimensions or downsized if too large, and store the new image (and its thumbnail) in a non-shared, private folder outside the webpage root, inaccessible to other users, and add an image entry in my database that contains the file path, user who uploaded it, all that jazz.

I then serve the image to the users through a server-side script instead of allowing them direct access to the image. Great success. What could possibly go horribly wrong?

Dev Diary Entry #58
Dear diary, I am contemplating scrapping the idea of allowing users to upload images, text, comments or any other contents to the website, since I do not have the capacity to implement the copyright-filter that will probably soon become a requirement in the EU... :(

Wat to do, wat to do...

I hate it when I reject their laughable offer and then they just go on and ask from me to recommend any friend for THAT position. Bitch, I rejected your offer for a reason, what makes you think I'll just throw my friends into those positions that I find offensive for myself. And also it's your job to find people, not mine.

And worst of all is when that come the other day with a different and even more laughable offer and I reject again and they again ask me for recommendations and the loop goes on until I HAVE to become an asshole and tell them some swearing words they could never think of.

Do you know one major thing (among others of course) that has made devrant feel like home for me after swearing off social media for a long time?

Common ground with users dealing with absolute, insane incompetency at work (I have it real bad at my job).

This doesn't so much make me angry or frustrate me as it makes me sad.

Everyone has varying levels of intelligence in infinite disciplines. Someone could make you cry because they play violin so beautifully but they can't tell you 4 + 4 because they are completely dense, but boy are they genius with that instrument.

Everyone is GREAT at something, that's capitalism's strength! Everyone can excel! I'm lucky enough to truly in my heart believe that programming, data and game development is my true calling...and I personally think I'm amazing at it.

It breaks my heart when people fall into or pursue something that clearly they just don't have enough passion for or regardless just don't have the skill for.

They become toxic to themselves, their employees/coworkers, their industry.

Sadly, power is given to people who simply aren't capable and power is bad on so many levels (aka fucking psychopaths gaining too much power) but it's also bad when people who don't know what they're doing or care get power.

People, I implore you...the secret to happiness and fulfillment in life is finding what makes you happy and what you're passionate about and good at and gripping it until you die.

Most people don't find it....but DON'T stop looking! It took me until my 30's to figure it out. My best friend in her 20's took her life because she couldn't find purpose...don't just be an asshat, incompetent manager in an industry you don't know a fuck about. Love what you do and help others excel.

This is how I get when I'm drunk, sorry. You guys will learn, lol.

Relatively new to programming. I have worked with c++ for about 7 months, worked with c# in unity to make games, created lots of different scripts and other programs using bash, python, racket and Java for class.

I am looking to become a video game developer, I work with unity and do lots of coding challenges on hackerrank.com and some other stuff. But I am wondering what I should do to really improve and am wondering what some of the vets out there would tell me to do, what kinds of projects to create, how to get better at programming as and whole andnd knowing more about the subject in general. Any help is appreciated, I'm looking to start 2017 on the right track to success!

actually, I'm reposting to this week's rant (Family support you got becoming a dev?) because I remembered some stuff. and also because reading other people's rants reminded me of stuff. The fam and I have changed dynamics, but there is a ten-ish year span that we kinda got along, and I constantly forget about it. (because what good does nostalgia do?)

So, about the fam support.
Parents were both devs. Engineers, to be specific. So yeah, I was around the material all the time. but I was not specifically interested and they didn't push it. (They were busy with other dramas in fam and society) I was more of a bookworm. an imaginative kid, who liked to spend time either reading a fantasy book, swim, play basketball or hang out with her friends. The whole programming thing came way more natural to me than one could imagine. Me getting into uni for it was pure luck because I didn't have the grades for the other thing I wanted. (which, thank fuck, I'm doing way better now) So yeah, the support was not really required. Except for food-clothing-shelter combo.

I did want to become an astrophysicist as a child tho, which they didn't really support. Bummer.

Hello fellow developers!

I know this is devRant, but I don't know of a better community with such diversity of developers like you guys and I need your input.

I decided to go on a language journey. I come from a background of php/javascript and feel the need to expand my horizons.

I'm going to write the same app in each language to get the feel of it and become familiar with the syntax and language concepts.

Since I'm a web developer I'll focus mainly on languages used on the web like: Java, Python, Ruby, etc.. But I want to cover others as well, like Objective-C/Swift, C++/C#.

I'm having trouble figuring out what kind of an app would cover most of the ground. I know the basic guideline for this is a TODO app for web frameworks, but I
don't feel like writing a TODO in Swift or C# really cover what the languages are intended for.

I don't know enough about the environments yet to come up with a good idea.

I want something, that can be language independent but would utilize the power of each language in one part or another and is still simple enough not to require weeks of development.

Does anyone have a brilliant idea what that could be?

So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.

I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".

But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.

The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".

Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.

It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.

It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.

But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.

THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!

So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.

Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...

How is coupling backend + frontend as a single nextjs app a good idea? What the fuck is this?

What if you have to create new replica sets of a backend because of high load pressure? What about load balancers?? What if i want my backend to be a microservice? How do i unit test the backend if its cluttered with frontend? WTF IS THIS

WHY DID NEXTJS THINK THIS IS A GOOD IDEA AND WHY DO SO MANY DEVS LOVE THIS IDEA AND GLORIFY NEXTJS?

Nextjs seems like the type of framework that was built by a frontend web developer who just refuses to learn backend technology at all costs.

---

its been a few hours and the concept of nextjs is bending my mind rn. I thought nextjs is just another frontend framework. A react killer. Only to find out its both a backend + frontend framework.

Cluttering backend stuff into frontend is gonna get messy no matter how much you try to modularize the code. Am i lost or am i right???

---

Scratching my head over nextjs. Looks like a great framework for small-mid project but definitely not large project. The more shit the project needs the more messy shit become. Angular has modularized all of this in separate folders -- components services guards interceptors (now new stuff coming called Signals) etc. All of it is separated in individual folders and kept frontend-only. Simple enough. No backend clutter

---

Can i even use nextjs strictly as a frontend framework while it uses my custom backend built in java spring boot? For example use nextjs /api/ folder to handle custom routes built outside of nextjs framework?

Am i insane here

I learned basic, Visual Basic and java in high school, then one year of college studying c++. I really hate c++ and swore I would never become a programmer. After that one year of college, I spent two years out of the country with no computer usage at all. Then 4 years working at a grocery store.
Then my friend told me about an opening at his work place for a java programmer. This was 7 years since doing java and 6 years since I had programmed anything at all. But I applied and interviewed. When asked about databases, I said “I know a little Microsoft Access.” Had no idea what relational databases were, never heard of php, but by some miracle they hired me anyways. Still working for them 6 years later, now an experienced java, php, MySQL, front end developer.
Still have no idea why they saw fit to hire me.

*sometime during my sophomore year in university. I was a Biology major and just switched to Computer Science. I'm currently a senior graduating in the Spring.*

Me: "Mom and Dad I changed my major to Computer Science!"

Parents: "How will you be able to make a living playing games?"

Me: "I won't be playing games, I'll be coding/programming things and building software."

Parents: "I thought you wanted to become a doctor?"

Me: "Well I decided I wanted to choose a career that I like and I also didn't want to stay in school for 8 years. Also, the salary I can make as a developer/engineer is close to that of some doctors."

Parents: "Well we wanted you to go to be a physical therapist. We feel that it's the best option for you."

Me: "I think this is my best option because there aren't even enough people available to fill the jobs that will be around when I graduate. Which also means that I can make a higher salary."

Parents: "Well I guess we'll see if you can make a living and provide for a family just playing/making games."

Me: "That's fine I never needed your support anyways."

*My parents thought that if the job wasn't physical labor then it wasn't a "real job". (Idk how they decided that a Physical Therapist was a "real job") I moved out less than a year after this argument because I was constantly put down by my parents for coding/programming as well as playing video games in my spare time. They thought it was childish. This has shown me what I won't do when I become a parent.*

*Just a side note: I have paid for everything I own that wasn't gifted to me since I was 18 and had a job while attending college. I also got a scholarship to go to college, so my parents didn't have to pay for any of it.*

I have this friend of mine, he was a former course mate and we can call him J.
J called a week ago saying he wanted to come stay with me for a few days and I said no problem buddy come home I'm always around.

When he came around he sounded quite different than the J I used to know. The first thing he said when I opened the door for him was "Do you know God?" and I was like "Hunh... Is that the latest javascript framework?". With my reply I was expecting laughter as a response but seems like buddy is serious.

J: Are you ashamed of him?
Me: What's up man? Jesus ain't coming anytime soon *still joking*.
J: Yes, he is. And we...
Me: Okay. Cut the crap man.

That night was quite long as we argued religious stuff front, back and center. I asked him why he became so religious but his response wasn't really clear. What I could sense from the discussion was "he's in it for the money" because while we were arguing he mentioned that God spoke to him that he would own a Mercedes Benz this year, so for that he created a WhatsApp group luring people to join to receive gospel messages and in turn ask them to sow seeds and make offerings all in the name of God. I was both pissed and perplexed by such an act of selfishness. Why don't you just get a real job, I asked J, and he said the jobs he could find doesn't match his taste :/

The religious argument continued to day 3 and I wasn't feeling it because it has affected my work as I couldn't even concentrate on most task that was supposed to be completed that week. I called him the next day and told him he shouldn't come to my place if he won't boycott the religious arguments we normally have at night because those are my working hours and the arguments wasn't helping matters. I ended the call when I got no response.

Throughout the rest of that day I felt guilt for what I had said to him, maybe there would have been a better way of putting out my reasons to him or atleast allow him arrive home before telling him what I just told him. I felt really bad that night, so the next day I tried to reach so he could come around when he's available but his line wasn't going through.

Few hours later I got a call from another friend we can call E.
--- E: Hey, have you seen J lately.
Me: Yes, he has been with me for few days now.
--- E: Is he there now.
-- Me: No he's not.
--- E: I need to let you know what's up. J isn't feeling okay. He has been with me for quite a while but recently this year he started acting strange. I think he has some mental issues.
-- Me: Mental what?
--- E: Yes. One time he pulled of his shirt running towards the street. I asked him where he was going and he said "they're calling me... they're calling me".
-- Me: That must be serious, I never paid attention I just noticed he was acting too religious.
--- E: Yes man. It took some time before I myself realised what was going on.
--- Me: So what do we do?
--- E: I've spoken to his brother and we also informed the police he was missing, I never knew he was with you.
--- Me: I'll try reaching out if I find him I'll get in touch.
--- E: Okay.

Hanging up the phone, I have never felt so broken in my entire life. All through those time I was arguing with someone in need of help.
How could I not have known. I'm stupid... I'm stupid... I'm stupid! I kept stumping my palm on my head. Shame unto me.
There were moments in our arguments with signs of clear red flags, some things he said wasn't just right but I ignored just to win the arguments. At one point he claimed he was God, at another point he said he doesn't need to work to become rich that money will visit him, he said some really bizarre things if I was observant enough I would have noticed but fuck me I didn't.

Next day, I got a call that he has been found and has been taken to a psychiatric hospital. He was suffering from bipolar disorder. When I got there, he no longer recognises me. This was the same person we both argued few nights ago.
This short experience was devastating for me. I cried like a baby right there in room filled with his family and some other friends.

No one knew why I was crying, it was just me and my guilty conscience. This would have been prevented atleast a little if I had acted differently. I can't hug him now... It's of no use. I can't tell him how great a friend he is and and how much he deserves the world now because it would be useless.

I pray day and night that he gets well soon and I could tell him how sorry I am for not realising he had a condition unknown to me.
I get to visit him twice a week and hope he gets back to the J I've always known, my buddy for life 💑

For anyone reading this:
Sometimes the people around you might look okay from the outside but I promise you there is a lot going in on the inside. Show love to whoever call you their friend and also don't take arguments personally (I failed this test), some people uses arguments to validate theirselves and some might not be as sane as you think.
#ListenMoreSayLess

I think I need some "programming detox", a couple weeks away from any kind of software development. It's just not fun anymore, I have lost my drive, I'm lazy to learn new stuff, I never finish my projects, I don't even know if I enjoy web development anymore.

Actually, I'm kind of lost on what to do with my life.

I don't want to become a full time web developer because it's boring, it's always the same shit: write frontend with some sort of framework, design database, write backend, rinse and repeat. There's nothing new, all projects seem to have the same requirements.

I don't want to get into machine learning and whatnot because it's a lot of math and theory, I like math but idk if I would like doing that all day. Same goes for basically anything related to research.

Low level stuff: on paper I like it, it's interesting, but I'm too lazy to learn and whenever I come up with a robotics project I end up making a shopping list and forgetting about it because either 1) stuff is too expensive or 2) I can't make the parts I want without spending a lot of money on tools. Also from what I can see in school, VHDL is boring af.

I just don't know what I like anymore, nothing gets me excited, not even video games. I used to like csgo but I just suck at it and I only play it because there's nothing else to play and deep down I still have a little bit of hope of becoming a decent player, even though I know I never will.

I just don't know what I want out of life. Sometimes I just like having tons of school assignments (especially calculus ones) just to keep me busy.

Hello, I'm a teenager and I want to become a Software Developer/Software Engineer/Product Engineer, I want to know how to start, what do I need to start learning, I have some knowledge of Javascript and I don't know if should learning Python or Java and where to learn it, please if somebody can answer those questions it would be great help and I would really appreciate it.

PS: I think I may need a mentor, if someone wants to help me my Discord is: patrik11

many many times in the past I had this impostor syndrome in various situations but I never lost faith in my dev skills!

you have to be humble to realise that this situations are fine and that you will learn something from it (not necessarily tech things, but also how life works). Also you have to realise that development as everything else in life is just never ending learning endeavour! When you accept all of that, impostor syndrome goes away forever.

It's been around 3 years since I felt like impostor for the last time because I accepted who I am as a person.

It crawled up on me last week in a different way - I was thinking of myself - what if I am just really good at googling things and understanding how those things work but I am also very capable problem solver so I can understand the principle and apply it to my code.

Then I realised - ok, that's what programmers do! So that's the story of how the impostor syndrome actually become confirmation syndrome!

Folks, believe in yourself, be forgiving to yourself as we all were there, give yourself some time as people don't become good developers overnight - and this is OK.

Me: *opens devTools*
Firefox: yea bro lemme just ..uh.. hmm yeah so this is the css for the element, see?
Me: Thanks.
Me:
Me: this makes no sense, why would I ever do that?
Firefox: also you can't have width on an anchor tag. I can't put that rule into effect
Me: I didn't put any width on your inline element, you sure about that?
Firefox: yea try using display: inline-block
Me: No. I'll just delete that. *checks file*
Me: Maybe that line is wrong because IT DOES NOT FUCKING EXIST!

What is this shit? I just restarted you! What else do you need, a reinstall? Drink too much over the holidays?

It's like the css editor has become a shallow tray with rules on it, and as soon as you bump it a little everything spills over and then Firefox just thinks oops, I've got this font-size: 200% lying around, lemme stick this into the hr tag which makes sense because THERE CAN'T BE ANY TEXT IN IT.