Manager: Feature C doesn’t work

Dev: We never built feature C

Manager: Nonsense, I remember feature C clearly!

Dev: It’s still in the backlog

Manager: But we had many meetings about it

Dev: Never got put on the board

Manager: Feature C is very important!

Dev: It was never assigned to anyone

Manager: What could possibly be more important than Feature C?

Dev: All the other features you placed on the board and assigned up until now

Manager: Well I need Feature C done asap! It should be top priority!

Dev: Ok then next sprint add feature C to the board and assign it to someone

*Next planning session manager leaves feature C in backlog in favour of other tickets*

*2 days later*

Manager: What is the status of feature C?

Dev: You opted to leave it in the backlog

Manager: BUT IT SHOULD BE TOP PRIORITY!

Dev: …

Police tech support, corruption, stilettos, fake agents, and all that. This is gonna be a long story.

Remember when I posted about wanting to become a digital nomad and how my annoying landlady has sped up the process for that? So I was looking for apartments to move into. Just a couple of months to get surgery, recover, and gear up for the new life. I met a real estate agent. He showed me his license, he's known by the guards and admins in the residence, and I met the unit owner together with him inside the unit itself. I did a background check and all looks good. A major property developer even posted several awards that he achieved. Sounds legit? Nope. This will soon become the highest level of real estate corruption I've ever seen in my entire life.

The property developer is well-established and has various luxury residences. After some further digging, I saw several posts about him in private owners' groups except they were screenshots of his name and face, not actual texts so it did not appear in the initial search. I see comments from several tenants and owners that he scammed. It turns out they even have a WhatsApp group dedicated into taking him down because he's done all kinds of trouble - bouncing checks, stealing items from the units, fucking up people's apartments, taking money from people and then ghosting them, etc.

Everyone seems angry but also hopeless because apparently, he's been doing this for years and the property hasn't banned him. There were discussions that the property itself takes bribe from him so he can freely go in and out of the residence. As far as I know, he's been doing this for almost a year, maybe longer but since he's a licensed agent with the management on his side, he's pretty much untouchable.

I mentioned his name to a previous agent I talked to, let's call her "Stiletto Girl" because she gave me a tour around the towers while wearing stilettos and dear god, I don't know how people manage to walk so long with those things on. Stiletto Girl was more furious than I am and sent me screenshots of their conversations. She obviously hates the guy and she confirmed that there is indeed corruption in the admin office.

I collected all these information and posted to an investors group to warn them about buying properties there. I received messages with terrible experiences and overall, people are convinced. This group has members that can buy properties in full with cash. I managed to get his account blocked in one of the payment options he provided and I was instructed to file a police report so they can permanently disable his account. I'm working on his other accounts.

After a trip to several police stations, I found myself talking to this asshole investigator in his camo. I fucking hated the guy and the tone of his voice. He gave me trouble for not knowing the suspect's full address. At some point, we were just yelling at each other. He made a phone call and went back agreeing to finally let me file a police report.

He asked for my ID. I gave him my company ID, I learned that doing this builds instant rapport to some because it's a well-known airline company and most of the people have taken a flight there so they're extra nice to me. Maybe they think I can give them a discount or something, whatever. Nope.

Him: "You're a software engineer? Are you good with computers?"

Me: *laughs knowing where this is going*

Him: "See, I have a problem with my computer. Can you fix it?"

Me: "Sure. Just give me the police report first."

He starts working on it. This time his tone is more friendly. Other police officers come in and he introduces me as his new "friend". As discussed, after the police report has been made, I sat on his computer and started fixing his shit. They went outside to respond to some emergency and asked me to guard the station for the meantime, lol. There's only me and another woman in a separate cubicle. When they came back, one of the police officers came up to my desk jokingly pretending to be a victim of some crime asking to file a police report.

I finished fixing his shit and now his asshole energy is diverted to the person I filed a police report against.

Him: "Do you think this guy is a one time criminal?"

Me: "Oh no, he's notorious and that property does nothing about it. I think he has a connection there."

Him: "WHAT?! I will pay them a visit tomorrow! Send me more pictures of him. If I see that fucking guy.."

During a company wide status meeting where all product managers, architects and directors assemble:

Me: *A product architect leading a team of devs*

Directors: So are there any issues or risks you see in delivering the next build in target time for Client 1?

Me: There are too many changes in feature requirements. First they said we can use a shared NFS for storage. Now they are asking to switch over to SFTP pull mode.. blah blah..

Directors: Oh I see.. well we can support both solutions then.

Me: But the deadlin..

Directors: *ignores what I say* Will be a good marketing point for future.

Me: But there are too many regressions in integra..

Directors: *ignores what I say* We should also meet deadlines. That is the most important thing.

Me: Its not as easy as 1+1=2.. The team needs more time to..

Directors: *ignores what I say* Ok lets move on to the next point. What about Client 2?

Me:

This guy just wasted 10 out of the 15 stand-up minutes speaking crap. It was very clear he didn’t do any work so just asked some crap questions just to throw people off. Okay it’s now 25 minutes past and he’s still talking. 30 minutes still talking. He sat on an issue for a week and did nothing. Apparently he’s overloaded with other issues and he’s giving that issue to me now. He already lost track of what test was causing the issue. Gave me the wrong test. What the fuck was he working on ? And he doesn’t fucking know how to disassemble and inspect the instructions. It’s basically a prerequisite for this whole team (and he’s a senior and spent significantly more time in this company). The shit people get away with. Still talking. Fuck off please !

!dev

My toxic father. Seriously man. It's my 4th day of learning to drive with an instructor. He sits besides and never knew how to drive. I think I am driving good wrt to being very new in it. He thinks just because I slow myself down on the road and cannot take a turn properly, let me say it again, on the 4th day of driving a manual car, he thinks I can never drive. What a fucking douchebag. What a fucking coward, impatient human says that. I am in rage because now I'm like 27, but in my childhood he was at his worst behaviour. That's why I was always scared of doing complex things, I stick with easy because I will make no mistakes. He has fucking no right in being proud of me. He's so fucking bad, I hate him. But more than hating him I want to find a way not to give a fuck about his fucking small discouraging shameful opinions. Fucker cannot do anything by himself. He's the most messed up fucking person I have ever seen. And oh god I fucking resent this guy.
I should start calling him a fucking retard that way I can devalue him as a person. I could never thought that I will think about a person like this but this retard left me no choice.
The thing is even a person is a retard I will try to understand them so give me a good word that just devalues a person instantly.

For all my friends here who have known me for years can easily notice there has been a drastic change in me.

I used to be confident. That shit was hollow but I used to laugh in the face of fear. I was ignorant and that ignorance fueled a lot of the much needed confidence.

Over the years, I learned a lot. The more I know, the more I realised how much I don't know. And for all that I know, I have to use the brain power to retain and implement it, else it rusts.

This image is of my 2021 goals that I drafted last December. Wasn't able to achieve the first, the last and the art one. But surely got myself surrounded by some of the smartest people I have ever worked with.

Now they have rightly said, be careful with what you wish for.

MY CONFIDENCE IS SHATTERED.

I feel dumb. Constant imposter syndrome. While I am learning every moment and there is no measure to it, I feel incompetent to an extent that I have started questioning how did I even reach this far?!

While, yet again I am the youngest in my team, my manager is bit micromanaging and agressive with OKRs/KPIs and tech team isn't very supportive creating constant friction (something I never faced with developers in my life because devs are my best friends), I fear how much more time will I take to ramp up in this new job and feel confident enough to tackle things on my own without constant nudge from leadership or different teams?

Or is it just that I have burnt out firefighting and lost the motivation I had?

After all, what does this all even mean?

This is what heaven looks like.

Brothers and sisters, I promise that everyone who joins my religion will ascend, and the gates of Liminal Heaven will be open for them.

Join now!

!rant, but kinda

My new director wants to buy a solution for a portal environment that my institution currently has. I have no qualms over it. My only issue was the company that sells it to be known to provide close to 0 fucking support when shit arises.

During a presentation we were told that they were using state of the art JAVA technology to render items on the page and that their ApI was easy for devs to grasp. This caught my attention since I know of very few and obscure Java frameworks that work with frontend tech (as in, your frontend logic is legit in Java)

The sales people proceed to show us React. Obviously thinking that no one knows what REact was. The dude continues with "This is new Java tech" all proud and shit prompting me to interject that it is "Javascript" the dude brushes it away saying "same thing" to which I reply with "Negative, please make sure that you properly discern Java from Javascript since Java is to Javascript as car is to carpet, completely different environments" the dude sarcastically says that "oh well, didn't know one of the people here was more aware of our own technology than we are" to which I say "and not only that, but the final say in us adopting your tech is mine, so I would rather you keep the sarcasm and the attitude to yourself, bring in a tech person if need be and learn these distinctions since we don't work with Java"

My new director later on went to talk to me since he apparently thought that Java and JS were related in some way. I can't really fault it, last time the dude touched programming was in the early 2000s, previous boss was a C and COBOL developer, but the previous dude would ALWAYS take my word no questions ask, this dude was there asking me if I was sure that Javascript and Java were really completely different environments asking me to show him.

I do not like to be questioned. I shoot the shit here and don't really involve myself with more technical aspects under this platform unless it involves concrete architecture discussions and even there I really don't care with engaging on a forum concerning that. But concerning my job I really.......really do not like to be questioned by people that know way the fuck less than me. I started coding when I was 17, I am 30 now, with a degree and years of experience. I really hate to be questioned by this dude.

Employer: Hey, we are moving an API update live tomorrow morning that could affect our apps. Can you regression test the apps to make sure they all work?

Me: The API team is pushing code overtop of live endpoints that can break them?

Employer: Yes, we need the updates to work with a new product we are developing.

Me: And nobody thought about versioning these endpoints so we guarantee uptime on all existing services using them now?

Employer: We looked at that but it cost extra and required us to use the cloud solution so we don’t use versioning.

Me: Okkk… I also take it that the API’s don’t have integration tests written?

Employer: What are integration tests? Are unit tests the same thing?

Me: No, so when do I need to regression test all 7 production apps?

Employer: The API’s are moving to production at 4am and we need it signed off by 7am.

Me: I only have 3 hours to regression test 7 production apps at 4am? Each app, if I just skim over them, would take me 2 hours each. I will do my best but that’s a very short time to ensure complete functionality.

Employer: Don’t you have unit tests?

From wiki: "The word 'hacker' derives from the seventeenth-century word of a 'lusty laborer' who harvested fields by dogged and rough swings of his hoe."

Isn't it fun when meaning shifts over time?

I remember hearing old school guys refer to themselves as hackers for years and my thought was whoa, so you fucks were pentesting in the 70s? Holy shit.

... turns out their usage of the word differs from my understanding of it. And to be honest, I've read so many definitions of the term since I have no fucking idea what an 'actual' hacker even is anymore.

So a 'hack' is supposedly a clever yet unorthodox solution? I always used it to mean 'I pulled some shit from my fucking ass and now it works', that is to say, this is a somewhat shabby and arcane way to get the job done but I have not found a viable alternative, or at least not one that makes any more sense when read through the lens of conventional logic.

Perhaps both meanings apply, in their own way.

One things for sure: I'd rather refer to my 'clever' bits of code as black magic rather than hacking -- but *just* to be silly about it.

Got some detailed feedback from Booking.com, upon asking.

I answered all the questions right. But they said I am not ready for a Sr PM role (which might be true).

Here are three points that I captured from the feedback:

1. Focus on details
2. Clear and better reasoning for WHY
3. Realistic over idealistic scenarios

While it makes me feel low that I didn't make it but this feedback will surely help me overcome the challenges and clear interviews in future.

On to the next one now. Let's see what comes my way..

One thing for sure, there is lots and lots to learn for me yet.

One thing I surely lack is articulating my thoughts and keeping things crisp while conveying the information aptly.

Anyone has any tips/resources on how to improve in this area?

I think the sleep deprived me is finally cracking under the weight of incompetent assholes.

We just launched a major project in some weird cocktail of Agile slapped with MVP and release to the wild in a waterfall, but it was premature, premature in the sense QA hasn't even finished their side of things, but because some fuck with with "manager" in their title decided they have burnt through the budget with incompetence and scrapped an entire element of the project and outsourced just so they could make a shittier version that doesn't even fucking work.

How hard do you want to fail before you will start listening to the people that now have to work around the fucking clock to clean up this horse shit of a mess.

I'm literally arguing over field mapping with multiple 3rd parties, when the fucking requirements state WTF this is suppose to look like. All because they didn't validate or test their own shit.

Why is EVERY FUCKING cock head in this industry a waste of space and cash! Is it really to much to ask for 1 fucking project to fucking go live that actually fucking works where I don't need to work 2 weeks straight (including weekends) after going live just to be sure that what shit does hit the fan isn't going to create a SEV 1 issue...

Sorry, I'm pissed at the incompetence of others I need to deal with on a daily basis. It's not like this field is insanely hard. A little attention to detail and self validation, verification goes a long way. But clearly that's a rarity.

Once this shit is stable and actually works, I'll be pulling out the mop to clean up half this shit just so it actually works.

Oof, I'm getting to old for this bullshit.

So we've got a gif that doesn't show up in our React Native application. Of course, the designers assume it's me: "are you sure the gif is in the codebase? how are you using it in your component"? yeah ok boomer. I'm like, look at this other gif, works fine. "oh" So I tell them, double check the export options on how you are building the gif, maybe there is something there. so now they are asking ME for those export options. I'M A DEV, NOT A DESIGNER, DO YOUR JOB AND FIGURE IT OUT. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT PROGRAM YOU ARE USING

oh as an aside, I was putting up a website for a client and they are like "my logo is quite similar to many others, is this something to worry about legally?" OH, SO NOW I'M A LAWYER TOO??!!?!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE GOOGLE IS LITERALLY IN FRONT OF YOU

why do people continually think just because we can code we are fucking designers / lawyers / astronauts
/ god?
man this pisses me off - i think of that draw red lines with blue ink expert video, in the end, just smile and nod: "i can do... absolutely anything... trust me, I'm an expert"

How to avoid death from Covid 19 and vaccines, a hypothesis to explain my near death experience and what to expect for the future, by a concerned citizen.

The important variables at play:

My weight = 220lb, overweight by 50lb say.

My muscle mass = very low, I can lift 25lb.

My age = 50+

Blood pressure = High, but not quite high enough to need treatment, on the edge.

Diabetic condition = Not.

Now lets introduce 3 Covid 19 vaccinations.

1st, no real effects to worry us.

2nd, no real effects to worry us.

3rd... bad effects..

I ponder, was the 3rd shot, maybe from a more potent batch, hadn't deteriorated in transit as much as the previous 2 ?

Did I also catch another version of Covid 19 at the same time ?

Was my fairly rare variables the result of which I now appear to have diabetic symptoms..

Has this damaged me enough that it won't just get better on its own, and my options are to, lose weight, gain muscle mass, and perhaps try a fasting diet ( Shown to work in mice.. ) in an effort to regrow my insulin-producing cells ?

So for those of you out there like me, suggestions:

Lose weight.

Gain muscle mass.

Self isolate 4 weeks before vaccine, and 4 weeks afterwards.

Try to be at the back of the queue for vaccines so yours has aged a bit and isn't quite so potent.

Thoughts ?

You know what fuck github , anyone remember when git cli was easy and straight forward to use

Now i have conflicting master branches because the remote is main and git automatically defaults to master.

Git still asks for a password while github can't wait to inform me how I have to go through the very long process of setting up an auth_token.

Apparently https remote origins for some reason don't work anymore, why because apparently i need to change them into ssh, good luck with the public key errors

This sucks , fuck github and fuck politics

my life is looking up, everything seems neat. what happens to my anxiety disorder? well, now I'm anxious because i feel like i forgot something bad, or like something bad is supposed to be happening. ffs someone trade brains with me pls

I finally got the clarity on my relationship.

Atleast I think I did.

I am officially done with Microsoft. I mean the only useful and sensible products left are Outlook and Excel.

Funnily both the products have hit their maturity stage and now MS is trying to bloat them. But still to a reasonable extent.

What other MS products are worth touching? Wait.. I legit can't think of any now.

Next on tagret, Google and Apple. Lol

Perhaps only Apple product I ever want to interact with will be (future tense) Apple Music (well because lossless and the fact that that the product is the reason for existence of the company).

NGL Steve had the right vision on Music. They tagged things right in their iTunes catalogue. But then MTV happened.

And now Spotify is the new MTV. Fuck me in ass someone.

So only Google? Well I have already sold my soul to them. What's more remaining?

To the reactjs-centered fucks who develop the popular web component viewing software called storybook: have you ever heard about semver?
89 alpha/beta/rc releases for a minor update 6.3 -> 6.4 with "100's of fixes and enhancements" "in preparation of the HUGE 7.0 release". Gee I wonder will it have 1000's of bugfixes? How bug-ridden is this software?
Every minor upgrade since 5.x is backwards-incompatible and requires a day of frustration finding out in how many more fucking NPM packages you split your codebase just because it's cool. I know move fast and break things, but some of us have other things to do than resolving node_modules incompatibilities you know. "No just hit 'npx sb upgrade' you say". I did, I really did! And the browser showed a blank screen of death with tons of cryptic React errors, it really did! Thank God you abstracted away all your dependencies in that sb command, now you can't even read the docs about what could have gone wrong with a specific sub-package. You have @storybook/html but the docs redirect to React pages, so good luck if you use something else

This is so sad... like.. the IDEA of storybook is great. But why did faith put the capacity to develop such a tool into the hands of people who think the world centers around React and JSX.. HTML should have been the default, and then you build on top of that for your fav framework, not the other way around

Since the 3rd day, I have been telling y'all but none of you listened to me.

I kept repeating that I am the dumbest person I know. Why didn't you believe me when I said it?

Remember, Booking feedback? They sent me another official rejection with additional feedback. Mind blown.

That feedback really helped me understand what was going wrong. And now today in an interview, I was asked a question and the interviewer said, "I am looking for a specific details like xyz for why you should be a Sr PM".

That's when it clicked me, that I have done stuff and I know things. It's just that I didn't understand the question and wasn't able to articulate and communicate well.

My dumbass just needs constant feedback to learn. How much I love feedback more than ever.

The feedback cycle is interesting too. When I was new, I hated it. Then started to realise the value of it.

Then it did felt bad in the very instance whenever I got one, but quickly I used to incorporate the changes.

And now, I am crave and desperately seek feedback. It only helps me improve.

Funnily, everyone gave inputs when I didn't want it. And now when I am hunting for it, no one is giving inputs. This is how life is.

Nonetheless, I am pretty impressed with Booking. Good people, nice vibes, and kickass culture for sure.

Fuck you material UI and your new emotion styling, I was comfy with makeStyles and now you can’t even provide basic typescript support with this emotion shit, why everything in React world has to be that complicated, what If I’ll come back to my project after 1 year and you change your mind AGAIN, fuck this shit gatsby is a great tool but I’m going for vue next time

Here's a fun little D'OH of mine.

I'm studying interprocess communication and messing around with shared memory. Nothing too fancy, just some basic fork and mmap shit to get my feet wet.

Now, I decide I want to test trying to have a child spawn another just to see if I'm at a point where I can handle it. WEll, I run it and get a bunch of error codes I've never seen.

But I'm me, right. So I drop the error between quotes into a search, there's only vague results from obscure sites but I do some reading and narrow down the issue to insufficient memory, more specifically, "the page file is of insufficient size".

And so I think mmmh, that's a little sus. I have plenty of free on-chip memory, why does it need a bigger page file? Ah, whatever, I have it set to 512MB anyway so that's probably too low. Alright computer, manage the size of this yourself.

Restart, thinking I cracked this shit. And then I go to run the program again. This time no errors, but the machine slows to a crawl...

What happened? Turns out it said the page file is too small because I WAS ASKING FOR MORE MEMORY THAN THE SYSTEM HAS, VIRTUAL AND PHYSICAL COMBINED. FUUUUUCK ME.

But alright, facepalm and takes me a minute to fix my mistake, easy money. Now I'm going to borrow the terrible error message idea and turn it into errcode 420 you are not stoned enough to execute this command, blaze it fgt~

Started at a new company... and we actually track our Apdex score now. Wow. I forgot what I was missing.

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.

wtf is JAMF? a quick look on internet and i can see that its a worst tracking software i guess. remote code execution, network tracking, app usage , system logging, keystroke tracking(maybe), this shit does everything you don't want. I guess this is the end of my devrant, pornhub, leetcode, freelancing, travel booking and everything that i would do on an office laptop while considering it as my own.

"Best remote work culture" my ass. if they can't trust their devs then why even bother letting them work from home? deport them to fucking Guantanamo bay, no?

This is a shitty situation . What do i do now? Install a vpn? will that work? please share names of some good and affordable vpns

i will have to check on this JAMF shit to see if i am able to keep my personal life away from its prying eyes. if not i guess i will have to buy a new device.

what do you people do? are you able to switch context b/w the 2 of your devices easily?I am shit at multi tasking

So, I've been with my current employer four years now, three and a half of which have been spent working as a time material developer for a huge fashion company. I've been trying to get out of It for the past six months only for my exit to be postponed everytime. There's also no clear idea as to what I would be moved to, going forward. Nobody Is telling me a thing and I think other developers will be moved to different projects before I do.

That's why I took matters into my own hands and started getting back into the recruitement process. I'm about to receive an offer. A fairly better one.

The thing is, I wanna use such offer to see if my current employer can reedem himself and propose to me a good counter offer. I'm not in the mood of starting over, but I want security and management to have a fucking idea of what my future Is gonna be like at this fucking company.

What do you guys think? Am I playing with Fire?

Did someone already thought about how color highlight can be better? It's been 4-5 years now that I'm coding on a virtual console that run on iPad with a monochrome code editor. Despite the fact that's remind me the old days when I was 8 years old, that doesn't stop me for coding with it.

I mean, is it really important to know that strings are red and numbers are yellow? How does that help me? They are both literal and behave to the user-content categories.

I was talking with my friend, and he says he likes to know if something is a keyword or an identifier. In C++, a lot of common keywords to define stuff and control the flow are often the first word and easy to spot.

A couple of months ago, I tried Flutter, and the editor can highlight ident blocks and give them different colors, but with Flutter, it's easy to get 10 or more ident levels, Does the color help? Splitting the code does.

I think, there is so much stuff that is more important than coloring the grammar of a language. For instance: knowing if an identifier belongs to which Rust Crate because, It's easy to stack 10 or more dependencies in one file that as better chances of names collisions.

Knowing if an identifier was recognized, if it used, if it's a local, a member, a global, a compiled value or a macro seems more important.

I would like to color block of code that is important or sensible. That will help my coworker about the severity of a particular place in the code.

What do you think?

I'm novkinger able to post tweets about Windows 11 on Twitter. Everytime I try I get an error saying tweet failed. But other tweets have worked. I've been bashing on Windows 11 for a while now.

What a fucking shit OS it is. I'm sick of it already.