*came in this morning to see this conversation in slack from the remote teams*

Dev: Hey guys, I'm trying to push to the develop branch, telling me its locked. Is there a new process?

Lead dev: Yes I locked it because the repo is now dead, the last release that went out is the last for this year and ever for this app. Were merging this app with another, starting from the last release's code. We'll all have to swap over to the new repo soon.

Dev: ... eh ok I didn't put anything in the last release branch as it wasn't urgent. Normally our process is anything in /develop goes out in the new year. I've been merging to /develop for the last few weeks ... is that code now gone?
*14 question mark emoji reactions*

Lead dev: Yes
*27 angry emoji reactions*

Engineering manager: WHAT? when was this decided? When was it communicated?

Lead dev: oh I assumed my product counterpart had been spreading the messages around, have they not?

Several teams: no, nope, first i'm hearing of it.

Lead dev: Ok, i'll ask them what happened. Be aware then that most of the stuff thats going into develop now, most likely won't be allowed in until March. They want to prioritise releasing this new merged app and don't want anything to impact it.

Dev: So wait, i'm working on stuff now. What do I do? Where do I base the branch? Where do I merge?

<no response>

*My team comes into the office*

Dev: eeehhh ... what does this mean for our past 4 weeks of work? and all the stuff needed to go out in January?

Me: not.a.fucking.clue

Worst meeting I've been in?

The one where I was told by my lead and the senior that my new colleagues were having trouble speaking to me because I'm a "strong, independent woman" and that I need to make sure I don't scare them when I approach them.

-_-

Tonight, I had the pleasure of being challenged to make a virus for a VM over at the awesome "virus aquarium": computernewb.com

I present to you the Eevee fork/bomb.
Tonight, was the first night where I've ever sat down and programmed in VBS. I had a lot of fun doing it too. Right now I'm aiming at corrupting taskkill, tskill, and shutdown for good measure. These are a few of the things that my buddy has pulled on me that has made it difficult for me to continue moving forward.

The other part is to create seperate .exe files that would run my the necessary script. Each of these .exe files will be unique such that it's more difficult to shut all of them down at once.

Despite the fact that this thing will quite literally break your computer, it's fun being challenged to think outside of the box. Quite literally. I've always been careful about what things I touched on a PC, but tonight was fun because I was basically unchained and allowed to run rampant.

As a computer geek I think it's good to let out your inner demon and see what havoc one could wreak.

!dev
!!personal
!!abuse

I'm a victim of rather severe child abuse, both physical and mental. I've cut my mother out of my life on several occasions, and disowned her husband on father's day a few years ago. Whenever they're in my life they make things slowly but significantly worse.

They'd been using my previous hard times to push their way into my life again, and are now trying to buy their way in -- this time not into my life, but into my 2yo son's life.

I've done everything I could to keep his existence from them. I hid pregnancy from them, dropped any mew mannerisms and cute vocabulary when speaking to them, never let them see toys or hear sounds if I needed to call them, hid the carseat, etc. I did a perfect job. Out of necessity I've been hiding my life from them since I was 13, and I've never done better than this.

But they knew his name, sex, and age. This means they went digging, and a bloody lot. There is literally no public info relating him to me, and nobody that knows us would tell them, either -- they all know and understand.

For years I've refused to tell these people where I lived, too. We've been here for over five years, and three years ago they just randomly showed up at our door. I never gave them an address, and the house isn't in my name. I never had any privacy when I lived with them, either -- literally not even in the bathroom -- but now we have our own house and they still randomly intrude? asldhflakshdf

But. This Christmas Eve, we got two large boxes (fruit flats) stacked full of presents from them. A third for me, a third for my girlfriend, and a third for my 2yo. Name tags and all.

Why can't they just leave us alone? On Christmas of all holidays? Why do they have to ruin everything? Why can't they just go away?

I've made things abundantly clear, and they just. won't. stop. I feel so angry and exasperated and helpless and trapped. I went from listening to "die in a fire" to crying helplessly on the stairs. All I want is to be left alone and not harassed and blackmailed and manipulated and guilted and given expired food as "gifts."

and before you ever even think to defend them, please re-read my first three sentences.

Just.
Merry fucking Christmas.

Root interviews for a job

So I've been interviewing for fun lately (and for practice), and it's been going mostly well. This one company in particular looks interesting, and they seem to really like me. This morning was interview #4 with them; tomorrow morning is #5.

The previous interviews were pretty enjoyable, especially the last one where I interviewed with one of the senior devs who gave me his "grumpy old man rails quiz." He actually asked some questions I wasn't able to answer! (Mostly dealing with Rails' internals.) Also when showing me the codebase, there were a few things I hadn't seen before, so it's exciting that I'll actually be able to learn something if I sign on. We ended up talking for almost an hour past our allotted time, and we got along famously. He said he was very surprised I did so well on his quiz because most people don't. Everyone else I interviewed with so far has liked me and gave positive reviews, too.

I don't know if I want the job, but that's beyond the scope of this rant anyway. The real reason for this comes next.

My interview today was with the VP of engineering. It was more of a monologue, as he wanted to give me perspective to see if I actually wanted to work there, but it was still very much a monologue. He's an old white guy who seems to loves to drone, and he never seemed very happy when I responded, so I let him drone and drone. Good information though.

But he's very set in his ways in some regards, and two of them were pretty insulting. We never really talked about technicals, and he just assumed that since I wasn't old and graying that I was a junior dev. He said, and I'll quote: "We run a lean but senior team, so we typically only hire senior devs here. But the dev team is all old white men. There's no diversity in talent, age, sex, race, religion, etc, and I'm looking to change that." He made several more allusions to my more junior level, too. He made a lot of assumptions (like how I'm not comfortable with structure because I've been the only dev so often) and got annoyed when I countered them.

I realize he has no idea of my skill level -- even though he should if he was listening to his team -- but to just assume that I'm not talented because I'm young, and bloody hire me just because I'm female? I don't want to be your diversity hire, old man. 🤬

So I'm feeling angry.
I might still take the job because the it offers considerable benefits over where I'm working (despite being quite happy here), but it will absolutely be despite him.

1) I accepted this job for way way less money than market value.

2) Approached boss about having performance review because I had been here over 12 months and no one brought it up to me.

3) Had performance review where they offered a big raise (12% but still way under market value)

4) I countered asking for market value and showed aggregate research (30% increase)

5) A week later we meet again and they offer 23%.

6) That's where we ended at, pretty surprised they offered that much, but glad. I wasn't looking forward to looking at other jobs to catch up to market value.

7) Feeling pretty good considering I've never negotiated anything before.

Collegue *yells through the office*:
Hey IT-guy the file is not there, where is it ?

Me: what file is not where ?

Collegue: you know that file i've been searching for 30 mins now on the Google drive.

Me: Have you tried hitting the name into the search bar ?

Collegue: Sure dude, I'm not stupid.

Me -> *one the way to her desk*
Collegue: OH! never mind I found it with the search bar. I swear it hasn't been there before!

*turning around, going back to my desk*
-fml

The place where I work part time, my role is to teach children how to code basic things in python, html and CSS.
There's a child who's been coming to this club for the past year, she's only 8 and is smarter than any other child I've seen in person.
Turns out both her parents are developers which is why she has an interest in coding too. It's so refreshing to see things like these, honestly. I hope my child in the future is like her lol.

I have a client (a friend of a friend of a friend) who came to me to build them a "simple" booking solution for their home cleaning business. Easy enough, I first thought.

Having taken a deposit based on my initial quote and contracts all signed, roll on exactly 8 months to where I find myself today.

It turns out, there is no cleaning business as the business will be totally reliant on the website. The original goalposts have now been moved to a completely different fucking country. The (now) required functionality has STILL yet to be finalised (I told client I'm not writing another line of code until EVERYTHING has been mapped out and made crystal clear), as every single face-to-face meeting / back and forth email turns into the client requesting hundreds more brilliant, essential features that make absolutely ZERO fucking sense. And now, to top it all off and push me into writing my first ever rant on here, I've just received an email from the client this morning saying "what I would like to have is like an online restaurant live booking system". WTF?!?!?

I work from home and have only my dog for company today, so please don't judge me. Just needed to let it all out.

I find it super annoying, this trend where no one wants to write learning documentation anymore, but instead put up a bunch of demo videos and video "training courses."

I don't want to spend 5 minutes watching you do something that would take me 10 seconds to read. I can't search for terms in your video, and I can't use them as a general reference manual. I can't go at my own pace, easily keep my place between devices, enter code as you go, the list of cons goes on and on.

I would rather pay you money for a good eBook (and no, PDFs don't count), than to have the only realistic way to learn about your software be a playlist on your YouTube channel.

This, however, this...

Went to check out Ansible again, because I've heard good things lately and it's been a couple years since I've looked at it.

Took me a while to find their docs because there's almost no mention of anything on the home page except trying Tower for free.

Found the docs. The first item there is the Quick Start Video and I think, "Cool. That's a good use of video, showing off the product."

I dig out some headphones, click play:

"Ansible is a powerful" BOOM!

Enter my email to watch the video?!

Ah, forget it. Maybe I'll see you next time, Ansible.

I've been wanting a thing where you can upload a file through a post request (api style), get a download link which allows for one download only (after the file gets downloaded it is removed) and be done.

Couldn't find one so quicky, decided to write one myself.

Two hours later I've got a functioning first version, this is the first time ever where I genuinely wrote a system I needed quickly within a few fucking hours and it actually works O_o

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

Back before we utilized stored procedures (and had an official/credentialed DBA), we used embedded/in-line SQL to fetch data from the database.

var sql = @"Select
FieldsToSelect
From
dbo.Whatever
Where
Id = @ID"

In attempts to fix database performance issues, a developer, T, started putting all the SQL on one line of code (some sql was formatted on 10+ lines to make it readable and easily copy+paste-able with SSMS)
var sql = "Select ... From...Where...etc";

His justification was putting all the SQL on one line make the code run faster.
T: "Fewer lines of code runs faster, everyone knows that."

Mgmt bought it.

This process took him a few months to complete.

When none of the effort proved to increase performance, T blamed the in-house developed ORM we were using (I wrote it, it was a simple wrapper around ADO.Net with extension methods for creating/setting parameters)

T: "Adding extra layers causes performance problems, everyone knows that."

Mgmt bought it again.

Removing the ORM, again took several months to complete.

By this time, we hired a real DBA and his focus was removing all the in-line SQL to use stored procedures, creating optimization plans, etc (stuff a real DBA does).

In the planning meetings (I was not apart of), T was selected to lead because of his coding optimization skills.
DBA: "I've been reviewing the execution plans, are all the SQL code on one line? What a mess. That has to be worst thing I ever saw."
T: "Yes, the previous developer, PaperTrail, is incompetent. If the code was written correctly the first time using stored procedures, or even formatted so people could read it, we wouldn't have all these performance problems."

DBA didn't know me (yet) and I didn't know about T's shenanigans (aka = lies) until nearly all the database perf issues were resolved and T received a recognition award for all his hard work (which also equaled a nice raise).

WTF? I've been laid off more than a month ago, AND THIS EXTRA-STUPID ACCOUNTING BRAT TEXTS MY PERSONAL PHONE TO COMPLAIN THAT SOME REPORT IS BROKEN.
(she still works for my former company, if that wasn't clear)
Bitch, you fucks literally told me this shit wasn't my problem anymore. Seriously, where do they find those complete morons? Don't they know how "being sacked" works? Or how you cannot expect any work from someone who was sacked?!?
Especially some sheila that only has a job because it is literally illegal to use a pocket calculator instead of an "human" accountant.
Fuck, now I'm kinda happy I'm out of that nuthouse.

VueJS FTW!

Today I realised I've been a fucking idiot.
For the last few years I have familiarized myself with libraries like React, VueJS, Preact etc.

All while playing around on my own side projects but when it came to doing actual work (perhaps from a lack of confidence/working experience with them) I always reverted to vanilla js or jQuery because I convinced myself it wasn't the `right` use case or `the project was too simple or small`.

I WAS AN IDIOT.

The below screenshot is a prototype of a n invoicing tool I needed to write which uses VueJS and is implemented in 50 beautiful, clean, maintainable loc. Combined with TypeScript it is a dream - never did I think I would see the day where I could grab an inputs numerical value without prepending the variable with + so I don't end up concatenating them as strings.

If your like me and haven't started using some kind of data binding view framework stop procrastinating and just do it. I feel like I wasted a large chunk of my life clinging onto my old ways.

After several months on the job hunt with some discouraging rejections, I finally got an offer! Thank you all for inspiring me to keep learning and to stay humble. I've been stuck in a role where I feel overworked and unappreciated, with no room to grow. Excited for this next challenge and new beginnings! 😊

Forgive me father, for I have sinned.  Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins.  Okay, a particular series of technical sins.  Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit.  Where was I?  Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession.  May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.

Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps".  Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed.  Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.

Fuck that noise.  Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman.  This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money.  There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.

Automated it anyway.  Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion.  Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually.  Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor.  Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.

Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain.  Vulnerability still there months later.  Test using it for automated updates.  Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility.  Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it.  Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time.  Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work.  Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.

Flash forward 6 years.  Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies.  Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system.  Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.

It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system.  There never was and never will be a SQL socket.  Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.

I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped.  I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore.  I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.

Noone cares.  Won't be my problem soon enough.

In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence

Okay, just because I'm the only one under 35, single, and only white/hispanic guy on this team doesn't give you the right to interrupt me mid sentence IN my meeting. No disrespect to the developers from India and this may just be a culture conflict where I am outnumbered in my company but I don't understand the how some of these guys can't just be polite or respect others opinions(this is just from my experience with 90 or so developers from India and I don't believe in blanketing all Indians as this way just these 90 plus I do love the food).

Don't hijack MY meeting and then completely derail where I was going and disregard my solution without listening to the whole thing for an idea that isn't even solution but adds more work for both parties involved. You may have been working here for 5 years, but I worked in the actual department where we're building the new process and solution to a problem I've worked on. I understand the user since I WAS ONCE THAT USER for a good 8 months. And on top of that you can barely code efficient, or complex SQL statements. You're nothing more than fucking script kiddies and this whole IT department is joke. I apologize if the rant isn't really that coherent, I'm not very good at typing rants with my adrenaline running hot.

Root has a deadline

I've been working on this CCPA ticket for awhile. Admittedly too long, but I'm new to the codebase and it's fucking sprawling. There has also been a lot of back-and-forth on the ticket.

Anyway, I've had a few blockers, such as how mailers work, the legal copy, where to put a admin-facing link to the dashboard, how to build the jira integration (and its creds), etc.

Quite awhile ago I asked Mr. Product, "Where should I put the ccpa dashboard link?" To which he responds: "I'll get you the answer today!" Awesome. Except he didn't. That day came and went without a peep. So, the next day I ask again: "Where should I put the ccpa dashboard link?" To which he responds: "I'll get you the answer today!" And that day comes and goes, too. I ask again, and you guessed it: "I'll get you the answer today." Repeat ad nauseam.

I also asked about the Jira integration and credentials. I got about the same treatment as above, but with a tiwst: they tell me to talk to / continue to bug Mr. H instead. Except Mr. H had been on PTO for weeks. Every time I ask, they keep referring me to him. A little over two weeks later (yesterday), I finally got a response from him. Yay! I was preoccupied with finishing the dashboard (which wasn't in the original ticket for some reason) so I didn't get a chance to look into it yet. After asking his boss three times, Mr. Product also finally (!!!) gave me a response on the link placement today, too! Though not directly: he discussed it with said boss in a group chat that I'm a part of, but never tagged me or told me directly. So, now I know where to put it (I think), but I have no idea how that area of the site is built (it's dynamic based on domain, login, and roles), so adding it will still be difficult.

The best part:

Today during standup, some lady I've only rarely seen before attends the meeting, doesn't say anything until the very end, and then announces that everything must be code-complete by tomorrow for release, and then promptly signs off.

For fuck's sake. I've had blockers on this for weeks, and now I need to finish it by fucking tonight?

I still don't know how to build the mailers (because translations and formats), nor how to actually send emails using them. I don't know how to modify the footer (dynamic, complex), how to add the admin-facing link (dynamic, complex), nor how build a Jira integration (haven't even looked yet). I just got unblocked on two of these fucking today. and it needs to be done and code reviewed by tomorrow?

No bloody way.
Maybe I should go back to my previous job. 😡

I joined a "multi-national" company in middle-east where 90% of the developers are Indian. And since it's a "multi-national" company with 50+ developers I thought they already figured it out. Most of them have 5-10 years of experience. They should know at least how to use git properly, deployment should be done via CI/CD. database changes should be run via migration script. Agile methodology, Code Review - Pull Request. Unit testing. Design Patterns, Clean Code Principle. etc etc

I thought I'm gonna learn new things here. I have never been so wrong in all my life...

Technical Manager doesn't even know what Pull Request is. They started developing the software 4 years ago but used Yii v1 instead which was released almost a decade ago. They combined it with a VueJS where in some files contains around 4000 lines of code. Some PHP functions contain 500+ of code. No proper indentions as well. The web console is bloody red with javascript errors. In short, it's the worst code I've seen so far.

No wonder why they keep receiving complaints from their 30+ clients.

I'm been hacking together software for the last year or so now and I've never considered myself to be a good programmer.

Today however I had to implement an A* search from scratch and with only the knowledge of how the algorithm should function I put together some code that looked correct.

I went to run my code expecting one of the typical "Index out of bound", "null reference", "something has not be initialised" BUT I was shocked to find that the code worked flawlessly.

I went into a weird state of shock and disbelief. I'm not naturally gifted at this stuff, so it was just really hard for me to accept that I might actually be getting better to the point where I might be able to say "I am a programmer"

Does anyone else get bad imposter syndrome?

!drunk (yet)

It's whiskey and code tonight!
(Whiskey because I couldn't get to my rum. annoyed face.)

Why? Because rum is so much better. duh.

More seriously: My boss has thrown me every single one his current tasks and is refusing to answer simple questions about them, such as "oh, so you already know about this bug; what's the cause?" or "how do i test this once i've fixed it?" or "where the fuck are you?"

and I'm also getting lots of bugs from other people. They're all basically categorized "urgent, please fix immediately" but should instead be categorized "super-boring and not-at-all-important, and should get fixed on the off chance you happen to remember it next year". That's the best category of bug.

I just gave up on fixing a Rails pluralize bug which fits into the aforementioned category quite nicely. It's returning "2x round of golves" -- which is hilarious and I might leave it in just for the amusement. But now it's back to fighting with ActionCable! Everything has been getting in the way of me finishing that. I'm about to start biting.

Speaking of ActionCable, it turns out my code wasn't wrong after all (have I said that yet?). Since the official documentation and examples suck, I've been digging through the (generated) javascript source and working my way backwards to learn how to use it. I cleaned up my code a little, but it was still correct. The reason nothing is working correctly is that API Guy gave me broken code. ...Again! Go figure. So I'll be rewriting that today. or tomorrow. (Whiskey, remember?)

I also have some lovely netcode to debug and fix. So totally not looking forward to that. The responses are less bloody reliable than my boss's code ffs. *grumble grumble*

I spent an hour arguing with the CTO, pushing for having all our new products' data in the database (wow) with an API I could hit to fetch said data (wow) prior to displaying it on our order page.

He never actually agreed with me, but he finally acquiesced and wrote the migrations, API, and entered my (rather contrived) placeholder data. (I've been waiting on the boss for details and copy for three days.)

Anyway, it's now live on QA. but. I don't know where QA is for this app, and it's been long enough that i'm kind of afraid to ask.

Does that sound strange?
well.

We have seven (nine?) live applications (three of which share a database), and none of their repos match their URLs, nor even their Heroku app names. (In some of these Heroku names, "db" is short for the app's namesake, while in the rest it's short for "database").

So, I honestly have no idea where "dbappdev" points to, and I don't have access to the DNS records to check. -.-

What's more: I opened "dbappdev" on Heroku and tested out his new API -- lo and behold! it returns nada. Not a single byte. (Given his history I expected a 500, so this is an improvement, I think. Still totally useless, however.)

And furthermore: he didn't push the code to github, so I cannot test (or fix) it locally.

just. UGH.

every day with this guy, i swear.

This is bullshit.

We've got a project where we need to build a robot that can:
A. Follow a line.
B. Avoid obstacles
C. Go through a maze.

This, in itself, is fine. I can manage.

The problem is, the teacher that is supposed to support the course, is never where he's supposed to be.
Ie: he was supposed to be in the classroom to answer questions and give feedback yesterday from 09:00 to 13:00. The fucker didn't fuckin show up.

OK, so today, he's supposed to be here too, I've been sat in his classroom without him waiting for over an hour...

Also, no way I can do the maze part without knowing what defines a fucking blocked path, is it going to be a physical object or is the line going to be a different cor if you're not allowed to pass there?

I'm getting tired of this bs.

My older brother just moved out today. For 18 years I've shared a room with him, and now he's gone. I have a ~30x10 foot room all to myself (it's the entire second floor of my house).

I do love that now I'm able to play music anytime, and with his stuff gone, it'll be less space taken up in general, that type of thing.

I've been in this room with him for over 8 years now, after my oldest brother moved out, and I've always had this feeling that one portion of the room was mine and the other portion was his. Now it's just...weird. I have both portions now. I have this whole big room to maintain myself. I don't have to worry about my stuff conflicting with his for whatever reason.

The past few weeks, when he's talked about moving out, I've always told him that I was looking forward to it, to having the whole room to myself. Now that he's gone, I just...can't. I can't bring myself to move his stuff that he hasn't taken over to the new house yet, or clean his part of the room.

When we were kids we didn't really get along, and I HATED sharing a room with him. But over time, as we grew up, we started to get along better, and for the past couple years, we've always just talked in the middle of the night when we were both awake. And now he's gone (the new house is maybe a 10 minute drive away), and I know he's not coming back. I know that this whole space is mine now.

I'm gonna miss the talks in the middle of the night, and us keeping each other in check (whenever one of us isn't home in the middle of the night we tend to text each other like "bruh where the fuck you at"), and waking up in the middle of the night (when I'm able to actually fall asleep kinda early) to see him playing Skyrim or Fallout. Hell, even coming home from work or wherever to see him passed the fuck out.

I know that I'm gonna have to clean the whole room soon, and that I'll just have to get over it. I've always been the one in my family that doesn't really show emotion very often, unless I get angry, so when people were crying earlier, I just sat there with an emotionless look on my face. But that's also because I wasn't really feeling much at the time, it didn't really hit until I got home and came upstairs to my room. Hell, right now I'm sitting here just expecting to hear his car alarm as he locks his car like I normally hear every night.

Me: Hey Guys we've been working on this application(project 1) for 4 months and i think we're almost done.

Owner of Company(Not My Boss): CooCook4Choo we moving you to project 2, forget about the previous one.

2 months go by, project is completed.

Boss: I've got another project for you
Me: Awesome!

1 month later...

PM: We're moving you back to project 1
Me: Why?
PM: Our senior dev resigned, we only have junior Devs and we need a lot of help before deployment next month.
Me: Why am i moving back to a project i was taken off of
PM: Where an agile company and you will be moved off many projects
Me: **Fuuuuuuuuuuck!!!* Ok i'll need documentation of everything that happened in the past three months, the current issue, what the current sprint revolves around and A demo of what has been added.
PM: Relax, I've got a lot of work myself, you will get them soon.

2 days later, still don't have what i need, PM is on vacation.

Me: Guess i don't have any work to do.

During the interview they asked if I had other interviews or offers. I had one more interview and am offer. They emailed me the next day and say "we don't like to be strong armed". I'm assuming it's because I told them the truth about having an offer? We hadn't even talked about salary yet so it's not like I somehow "bullied" them into giving me more money.

Part of me didn't care because obviously this company was garbage and I dodged a bullet (plus I had an offer that was decent anyways). But the other part of me couldn't believe how fragile they were and how entitled they felt. Why ask the question if you don't want to know the answer? Where I'm at now, I got another offer before they made a decision. I had to decide within a couple days. I told them, and without any further conversation made me an offer 10k above the originally discussed salary. It was clear they were decent and so far I've been right.

Recently I've been working on a side project and I've been working on it a lot over the last week, with lots of late nights.

My girlfriend said to me the other day, "do you not wanna give it a rest for a bit, you'll be starting your new job soon, you'll get fed up of it".

I then explained to her that, programming is on of those few careers where you'll continue to do programme and do side projects, even after a full day of it, and I couldn't imagine it any other way.

I can't wait to start work.. but then I also don't wanna lose out on project time 🙁

It has come to my attention that people like to read!

Specifically, I mean that a lot of ranters like fiction.. :D

I've been trying to decide on something to write for a while now, and I think I have it..

"The Traveler" (name open to suggestions)

The Traveler is a magic-based fantasy where our main character travels between world's using ancient stone portals (think: Stargate) and uses her unique powers to play god.

Each world she visits will equal to a different story, and she might play a good or bad guy (or both) depending on what the world has in store for her.

Her powers will include my WIP magic system from RISE, as well as some extra querks that aid the flow of the story.

I may still work on RISE, and I will keep in mind that The Traveler and RISE come from the same universe (I think RISE will be a prequel to The Traveler, and tell the tale of how she got her powers, and the origin of the portals..)

Let me know your thoughts below! ^~^

So, I love scribbling ideas on a whiteboard, like I'm sure most developers here do!

It's a release of creativity and a starting point for many sources of software I've developed in the past. And something that doesn't happen all too often where I get an overflow of ideas and put them on a board.

This week was one such rare week where the ideas just came streaming in and the floodgates weren't able to hold them back...

Then came the dam wall down river... MANAGEMENT!

They had already sold a product to the customer that didn't exist yet and tasked a junior developer (I'm talking fresh out of school) to deliver. Of course, this was promised last year already and now the customer had paid and is waiting for the goods!

Along I come with this design which will enable the product to grow, allow the junior development to learn, me to mentor and for us all to let the creative juices flow, all while I get to flex my web dev muscles.

But management wants something now! A temporary solution for the customer to keep them happy, seeing as they've paid some money, which is to be developed by the junior dev on his lonesome.

Meanwhile my beautiful design has been snuffed out and are mere streaks and smears on a whiteboard, and the creative juices seem to have dried up since.

I am feeling somewhat despondent at the moment...

I think I ranted about this before but fuck it.

The love/hate relation I have with security in programming is funny. I am working as a cyber security engineer currently but I do loads of programming as well. Security is the most important factor for me while programming and I'd rather ship an application with less features than with more possibly vulnerable features.

But, sometimes I find it rather annoying when I want to write a new application (a web application where 90 percent of the application is the REST API), writing security checks takes up most of the time.

I'm working on a new (quick/fun) application right now and I've been at this for.... 3 hours I think and the first very simple functionality has finally been built, which took like 10 minutes. The rest of the 3 hours has been securing the application! And yes, I'm using a framework (my own) which has already loads of security features built-in but I need more and more specific security with this API.

Well, let's continue with securing this fucker!

So lately I've been seeing a lot of hate towards languages like C, C++ and java.

Someone at work literally said go would replace C++ and that anyone still using it is a dinosaur.

He said no one uses this languages anymore.

Am I just being left behind or are most real time devs not using C et al anymore.

I mean c++ has a 2017 update and we work with devices for aviation and the like that need to be certified I don't see go becoming our main language anytime soon.

I'm not saying go isn't a good language I'm just saying the others aren't at the point where we take them out back and shoot them.

I've been encountering a problem in my personal projects code weeks.
fast forward to today, and i'm sat enduring a wedding.
Out of no where the soultion hits me and I spend the next 25 minutes running round asking for napkins, so I can write the soultion on said napkins with a kids crayon.

Work. Never. Stops.

So I've been applying to jobs. I, purposely, have been putting down that I am female (since they all harp on diversity, I'd like to see if they even bother reaching out to me. Also anything to get my resume past the bots).

Spoiler alert - getting similar ratios to male counterparts, 100+ applications sent, maybe 4 phone interviews. No offers yet. Still made to do code challenges.

Well, I just found out where all that diversity hiring went to. Buddy of mine who works at a mid tier company said that they have a special program that onboards women into tech.

Specifically, women who have literally zero background in computers.

Teachers, social workers, etc. They get a week or so of some coding bootcamp and then get full time positions over more skilled applicants.

This infuriates me. I literally would be in a better situation to be hired had I not have had any technical background, taken this particular bootcamp and finally net the elusive entry level position I need.

And guess what? That move has antagonized the existing male employees who see that they have zero interest and zero competency instead of having an integrated workplace.

10/10 for incredible bullshit.

Somewhere in a lonely break room
There's a guy starting to realize that eternal hell has been unleashed unto him.
It's two a.m.

It's two a.m.
The boss has gone
I'm sitting here waitin'
This desktop's slow
I am getting tired of fixin' all my coworkers' problems
Yeah there's a bug on the loose
Errors in the code
This is unreadable
Rubber ducky can't help
I cannot debug, my whole life spins into a frenzy

Help I'm slippin' into the programming zone
Git push to the prod
Set up a repo
My hard drive just crashed
All my code is gone
Where am I to go
Now that I've broke my distro
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow

I'm falling down a spiral
Solution unkown
Disgusting legacy, ugly code
Can't get no connection
Can't get through to commit

Well the night weights heavy
On my confused mind
Where's the error on this line
When the CEO comes
He knows damn well
To keep his distance
And he says

Help I'm slippin' into the programming zone
Git push to the prod
Set up a repo
My hard drive just crashed
All my code is gone
Where am I to go
Now that I've broke my distro
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow

When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow

When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow

I work at a student help desk. I've been asked where the "any" key is located 3 times today. WHY.

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.

Long time lurker, first time poster. This site has been a huge source of fun and laughs for me on bad days.

So dear fellas,

I've been a software engineer for about 5 to 6 years which was intense as fuck and I've been burnt out multiple times. My highest rank was a senior software engineer so far.

I was offered a new job recently as a Technical lead for a small team which would mean I have to make architecural decisions on top of good ol grunting out the code. I took up the offer but I'm more worried than happy.

Impostor syndrome has kicked in heavily ever since I agreed to the job. What if they realise I don't know certain things that engineers are supposed to know? What if I get in an embarassing situation where somebody asks me a question and I'm not able to answer? What if people who I work with laugh behind my back cos I'm not a rockstar engineer?

I'm depressed and scared as fuck right now. Usually I had someone senior to ask my questions or get my doubts cleared with, now it looks like I'll be making those decisions and getting things done and I'm shitscared and worried as fuck.

Does anyone have any pointers, tips or anecdotal advice that might help me? It would be much appreciated.

Sorry for the incoherent rant. Have a good one y'all

I found out last week that I was passed up for a promotion not because I didn't deserve it but because I got one last year.

My manager asked to have me promoted. People on other teams wanted me promoted. HR did not.

I wasn't mad about it at the time but the more that I think about it the more it's getting me down. I've been pushing myself trying to prove that I would be good for the position and now I have lost all motivation and I hate it. I like where I am at and I like what I do but this has really killed it for me. I'm struggling to get anything done now.

Most useless meeting?

I once went to a meeting where people spent half an hour discussing when to reschedule the meeting that we were in because we couldn't have it then even though nobody was absent. The actual rescheduled meeting was also half an hour long, and could have occurred during the time when we discussed when the meeting should occur.

I've been to a lot of useless meetings (I still think that most meetings I attend could have just been an email chain or Slack conversation), but that one takes the cake.

!dev

So, I've been talking to this girl for a couple weeks now, and she fucking makes me happy guys. I kinda mentioned her once or twice on here, but I didn't really want to say much cause I wasn't sure how stuff was gonna go with her.

But basically now, we're just "talking" if that makes any sense to any of the younger, more social audiences here. For those who may not get what I mean, it's like we're not really looking for anyone else, but we're not really official or anything. Just somewhere in between like friends and dating (she confirmed this for me cause I've made assumptions before and got hurt so I wanted everything to be crystal clear)

I actually met her because she has a class with one of my friends. I mentioned their class in my contribution to the weekly rant this week, where the graphic design class was doing some basic webdev. I skipped my anatomy class to go there one day, started talking to her (actually the day of my rant where I said I'd been up for like ~30 hours or however many it was. LIKE EVERYTHING I POST ENDS UP REFERENCED IN ANOTHER POST), and just kept skipping mainly to see her. Then my friend gave me her Discord and we started actually talking to each other.

Within like 2 hours of us first messaging we had one of those like cute couple arguments. It was over who had prettier eyes, cause I have blue eyes (that people usually say are beautiful, I posted a couple pictures here once), and she has really pretty green eyes. I said that hers looked better, but she said that mine do....She won the argument.

Since then, it's just been fun and cute and I fucking love it. SHE EVEN SAID A PICKUP LINE TO ME A FEW NIGHTS AGO THAT I JUST LOVED. It was "your eyes are more gorgeous than any source code I have ever seen". She found it online, but like at the time, that really touched me.

I'm just so excited about all this guys. She's adorable and I love talking to her. The one thing that's KINDA weird is that she has the same name as my younger sister, but we call my sister a shortened version of the name, so it's not THAT weird.

And I'm just rambling at this point, like I generally do with my rants. She actually knows my profile name and everything (but she isn't on here, she does art, not computers), so she could possibly see this, but I'll likely end up sending it to her at some point anyways.

Im so frustrated with myself . I've always been afraid of being stupid . Perhaps it was because i was always called the "less intelligent" sibling by my parents . Well i did self-learn java , c++ and android (when i was 15) and made some apps and i did get acknowledged finally but i may have not acknowledged myself . I got into college a couple years ago and i can tell you right out that its like an island filled with stupidity. The teachers , the students. The other day i caught my teacher learning how a transistor works. This is unacceptable for someone who is teaching us advanced op-amps and other circuits . Well , I did get into this college cause it was less tedious and i thought college doesn't matter cause i can self-learn . All i needed was free time . Well college totally destroyed that too and provided no facilities in the process as well . So yeah should i blame my college for my inability to do things the past couple years. I mean i don't think i've learnt a single thing all this while. This is where my frustration begins cause i dont want to blame the college , it's not going to help me and i'll probably end up in a 9 to 5 call center job at this rate . Im also very heavily frustrated with myself , it's like everything i've done so far has been a path of least effort. I have tried a few things which were all just fads like machine learning and crypto and even trading . They felt good and thats what scares me , maybe i don't have the passion and am just looking for a quick buck . This is clearly reflected in the ideas i've been having as well . Well i've never had access to proper funds but now im just trying to justify this layman emotion . I just want to learn and be passionate about learning , researching and i just want enough funds for that . But im afraid , maybe its just that i want to feel superior than my circle . I mean i still don't know why i tried learning rust and wasted even more time setting up fedora and everything around it while i already had a working debian setup and a programming language i'm kind of versed with . i wouldn't say well cause im a self learner and i feel guilty for that . I definitely know i just learnt the surface of the language . Deep down i'm just another stupid fad obsessed guy who feels better by choosing a more complex language that my colleagues look upto . Is this what i am , if so im scared and i don't know what to do . People say that you are what you are and you cant change that . If i cant change this then i dont deserve this wasteful stupid life . I don't know what i should do and it makes me cry . Maybe acknowledging this would've helped but it hasn't , I've felt better playing fortnite rather than learning some basic electronics. Im another one of those aren't I ?

The next motherfucking asshole, that says there is a shortage of trained IT personnel in Germany, will get their eyeballs ripped out and squished back into their mouth.

I've got my trade degree in mid August. since then I've been without a job. The first 2 months where, bevause my former employer took ages to create my work-certificate (document that shows that you actually worked there and what you did).

Since then, I applied to a multitude of companies and got denied for various reasons. My favorite was "seems unmotivated".

The number of open IT positions is directly correlated to the collective assholelishness and entitlement of HR/management.

Just want to share that in August I'll be starting my career as a developer, something which I'm super nervous and excited about.

I just finished my bachelor degree, and will be starting mid-August. I've been moderately interested in the concept of programming since I was 14, but I initially didn't think I had what it took to make it my profession ("Programmers need to be good at math and that sort of stuff, right?") So I studied electronics and started at the same place where I finished my apprenticeship, working IT support. Eventually, I found myself not fully pleased with how things had turned out and quit my job to get a bachelor degree. And now, having graduated a few days ago, I'm very excited to see what my future as a developer will bring. I'm stoked and nervous at the same time, and I just wanted to share this with someone.

During my time as a student, I've been so lucky as to have discovered the world of JavaScript/Node.js/React in addition to all the standard Java-centric curriculum they taught at school, and I think that's an area I hope to explore more in the coming future.

I have this project I've inherited, yea I seem to do that a lot, but this damn thing, has to run in php5.4, has deprecated functions for php7 everywhere and a lot of them and there's no classes anywhere beyond some libraries.

Everything is procedural with random scripts being injected left right and center.

I kid you not,

$thisThing = true;
If(x==y)
require "path/to/some/script.php";
else
require "path/to/a/slightly/different/script.php";

If($thisThing === false){
// well it was modified in that small block about 10 different times
}

Those injected scripts then accept data from the parent scope so, looking at file X, you need to have open file A,B, E, and M to understand where variables have been initialised and what there current state could potentially be.

Basically this thing was bandaid after bandaid for feature requests with 0 refactoring.

Here I am trying to implement some basic functionality (should only take an hour or so + a bit of manual testing) but no, I'm literally at the point of hitting the delete button on the entire project and starting again.

I've been working with some new programmers now, trying to make this a place where people actually like working at. In my experience, most workplaces are bottom of the barrel shit, so I really wanted to try and make this the opposite, at least for the engineering team. When I hear them say how much they like working here, and how jealous their friends or family are at how much they are enjoying themselves and chilling with their coworkers and even their boss, it makes me feel so nice.

It might be a tiny company, but spreading happiness is great.

Right, I've been here before.
Our app requires an internet connection, and one of our clients wants to roll it out on a strictly managed network.
We told them which addresses our app communicates with and their network team opened them up for traffic. Should work, right?
Nope, doesn't work.

So I request them to use Fiddler to do some debugging of the network traffic, and lo and behold, it does work when Fiddler is active.
One important detail is that Fiddler uses it's own SSL certificate to debug HTTPS communications. I've had moments where expired certificates were the cause of things not working and running Fiddler "fixes" this because of their own certificate.

So I point this out in numerous mails to their network team, every time I get a response saying "nah, that can't be it".
I keep insisting "I have had this before, please check if any installed Root CA Certificates is expired"
At this point I'm certain they have updates turned off on these machines, and their certificates must not have been updated for a long time.

At one point they come back to me. "Hey, when Fiddler is off, WireShark shows the app communicating with ICMP calls, but when it's on it shows HTTP calls instead".

...YOU'RE THE SUPPOSED NETWORK EXPERTS?! You think data can be send via ICMP? Do you even know what ICMP is? Of course you'll see ICMP calls when the network is rejecting the packages instead of HTTP calls when everything's fine.
(ICMP is used to communicate errors)

I'm trying to keep my patience with these guys until they find exactly what's wrong because even I am somewhat grasping at straws right now. But things like this makes me doubt their expertise...

What the hell happened to devRant?

So we have this person who is digging up old posts, harassing people (@LotsOfCaffeine here, me as well, probably more) and some fucking how is getting 14 updoots while obviously being, or at least portraying themselves as a misogynistic hater of everyone and everything. What the actual hell is up with devRant? How are there FOURTEEN OTHER PELPLE who AGREE WITH THIS PERSON. How many active users are we here? I'm sure 14 users is a pretty significant percentage of the active user base.

People, I feel bad for this person. I've been a bit of a dick to them and so have many more, but what the hell happened to devRant, the place where you went to rant about stupid colleagues and bosses, share funny coding stories and other bulshittery? We're turning into fucking 4chan with politics, sexism and racism being the main story line here. I dont fucking get it. I'm on the brink of just leaving. I'm so fucking tired of this shit...

This is a followup to my earlier RealTek networking rant.

After reviewing and researching all of the wlan adapter suggestions on that rant, as well as a few more, I settled on an Alfa AWUS036ACH usb3 wireless-ac adapter. Every Alfa I've ever owned has been amazing, so I happily bought it.

It arrived today, and I excitedly threw my existing RealTek garbage across the room, hooked up my fancy new toy, and... nothing.

Fearing it was doa, I ran `lsusb` to see if it was even showing up... and it was! but identifying itself as a RealTek device...?

All of my research showed it uses the Atheros9k chipset. It's advertised and praised as using the "famous Atheros AR9271 chipset" and the Ath9k drivers. Except this particular unit appears to use the RTL8821AU chipset, therefore requiring RealTek drivers. askfja;sldf.

I unhappily fetched the garbage from the dirty laundry where it landed, installed it, and began my research anew.

I found, among all of the wonderful promises of Ath9k bliss, a thread on the Kali forums corroborating the RealTek driver nonsense, and it explained how to get the RTL8821 drivers working with it. which is pretty much the very last thing I want to do.

If you've read any of my networking rants, well, they've all been about how totally awful RealTek linux drivers are, and that's pretty much common knowledge anyway. So I'm like extremely pissed off.

ARGH WHY IS NETWORKING WITH LINUX ALWAYS SO FREAKING DIFFICULT? haslkfjasgdskg

I've been programming for a career and as a hobby for more than two years now. I want to start contributing to some projects on Git hub, but I'm not sure where to start. What advice do you have for me for first starting out on Git hub?

This is gonna be depressing. You have been warned.

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

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

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

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

Easy - in 2012 got the best paying position possible for my specialty (SharePoint) in my country, and 2 years later the company transitioned away from relying on Microsoft stack, so I've been made redundant.

Found a job in another country, and decided to make a permanent move. My girlfriend at the time was brave enough and followed me. We got married there, and then both worked for the same company, then moved countries again because we could, but continued to work remote for the same company, then she dumped me, and I decided to stay put where I was geographically and happy to say since have found a wonderful partner and life is pretty swell (still working for that original company, 8 years and counting)

So yeah. Work impact.

If anyone has been keeping up with my data warehouse from hell stories, we're reaching the climax. Today I reached my breaking point and wrote a strongly worder email about the situation. I detailed 3 separate cases of violated referential integrity (this warehouse has no constraints) and a field pulling from THE WRONG FLIPPING TABLE. Each instance was detailed with the lying ER diagram, highlighted the violating key pairs, the dangers they posed, and how to fix it. Note that this is a financial document; a financial document with nondeterministic behavior because the previous contractors' laziness. I feel like the flipping harbinger of doom with a cardboard sign saying "the end is near" and keep having to self-validate that if I was to change anything about this code, **financial numbers would change**, names would swap, description codes would change, and because they're edge cases in a giant dataset, they'll be hard to find. My email included SQL queries returning values where integrity is violated 15+ times. There's legacy data just shoved in ignoring all constraints. There are misspellings where a new one was made instead of updating, leaving the pk the same.

Now I'd just put sorting and other algos, but the data is processed by a crystal report. It has no debugger. No analysis tools. 11 subreports. The thing takes an hour to run and 77k queries to the oracle backend. It's one of the most disgusting infrastructures I've ever seen. There's no other solution to this but to either move to a general programming language or get the contractor to fix the data warehouse. I feel like I've gotten nowhere trying to debug this for 2 months. Now that I've reached what's probably the root issue, the office beaucracy is resisting the idea of throwing out the fire hazard and keeping the good parts. The upper management wants to just install sprinklers, and I'm losing it.

Been told to fix a bunch of links as a urgent issue. So far i've spent 3 hours trying to find anyone who knows where the damned things should actually be i pointing.
The joy of Mondays.

I think, after a few weeks, I'm actually quite enjoying that the Android SDK is genuinely awful.

We all know the feeling: "This is shit, whoever designed this is a fuc...oh, I get it. This is pretty cool actually."

So, it's nice to encounter a genuine dumpster fire of a platform.

I think the beautiful thing about its absolute obsession with providing a context to every single operation, is that you end up passing it around so much that the very concept of context becomes redundant.

Honestly, half of the stuff in here I've just attached to a global statics class, because it saves having to request a context, or a manager or some fucking kind of adapter, and it works just fine.

I've started to laugh when I look up a solution and see the browser scrollbar shrink into infinity, because the recommended answer is about two whole pages' worth of boilerplate to make the back button disappear or something.

I don't think there's been a single moment where I've just been in the flow of writing code. Pretty much all of the process is grafting boilerplate into it.

Not long til deadline, thank fuck.

Slowly getting better with RegEx problems! Warning, lots of non-computer linguistic geekiness ahead.

Been working on some functions recently to replicate the furigana (Chinese character annotation) functions available over at JP.SE in PHP for a project.

Managed to get the basic cases down fairly quick:

[Chinese character][reading] => <ruby><rb>Chinese Character</rb><rt>Reading</rt></ruby>

However I realized this evening that there are patterns where this repeats twice for one word, such as the following:

[Chinese Character][helper Japanese character(s)][Chinese Character][possibly optional word ending][reading for the whole thing]

Managed to get it working for both cases initially, but then I found out that adding a Japanese character to either of my test strings (see graphic) would cause the annotations to fall grossly out of sync. The next two hours disappeared pretty fast before discovering that the issue was that I was removing the wrong string length from the annotation string, and just happened to luck out with a test case where it worked the first time.

Probably going to do a code review of it with the intern next time he's in. One of the things I've been stressing to him lately is that however easy a task may be for a human, there are all kinds of extra things that need to be tracked in order for a computer to be able to follow your logic.

It's maybe a cultural or language thing (or perhaps a generation thing!), but I've read some rants today where there has been a suggestion to shoot/kill yourself if you're guilty of some inefficient process or bad practice.

At the risk of over-reacting or coming across as humourless or stiff, it's not something I would ever say to anyone - light-hearted or otherwise.

Me, the only iOS dev at work one day, and colleague (who we'll call AndroidBoy), the only Android dev at work that same day (he's been working with us for less than two months). There was a change in one of the jsons we received from the server: instead of receiving a list, we now received a dictionary with strings as keys and lists as values. My iOS colleague had already made this modification on our parse function the day before.

AndroidBoy: "Hey what happened with the json?"
Me: "Oh, well instead of parsing a list, we'll parse a dictionary and get the list from each key. You basically have to do the same thing, only this time the lists are organized into categories."
AndroidBoy: "Oh, ok. But I don't know how to parse a dictionary while using Retrofit." (Context: Retrofit is a framework for request handling - correct me if I am mistaken, that's just what I've been told)
Me: "Sucks, dude, can't help ya. I've never worked with that and don't have that much exp. with Android."

I go out for a cigarette break. When I return, AndroidBoy is nowhere to be seen and suddenly I can't seem to get that data in my app. AndroidBoy comes in from the room where the backend colleagues work.

AndroidBoy: "Solved it!"
Me: "Solved what?"
AndroidBoy: "I told them to change back to a list and just put the key inside the objects of the list."

... he used the precious time of the backend colleagues to change the thing back hust because he was too lazy to search how to parse a dictionary. I was so amazed by his answer, that I didn't know whether to laugh, scream at him or punch him in the face. Not to mention the fact that now I had to revert just so he could avoid that extra work.

I've been thinking about how to answer this for a while, but I'll approach it from a different angle. The time I (nearly) lost faith in my dev future wasn't because of a technology, bad programming language or an external influence. It was *me*.

The first job I had after the PhD, I was (in the first couple of weeks) tasked with updating various packages on a live Redhat server. "No problem", I thought, "I've done this before many a time on Debian, easy as pie!"

Long story short, I ended up practically bricking the server because I mistyped and uninstalled something I shouldn't have, didn't understand a piece of configuration, then tried to bodge it back and cocked things up further. Couldn't even log in via SSH, the hosting company had to be called, a serial connection set up, etc.

To say I was mortified, embarrassed and had my pride dented would be a massive understatement. I seriously thought I'd get fired on the spot, and that I should perhaps change careers to something where I couldn't cock things up as much.

...but you can't think like that, otherwise the world leaves you behind. So I picked myself up, apologised profusely, took some relevant training, double checked everything I was doing on that server in future and got back to work. After a few months of "proving myself", it was then seen as nothing more than a rather amusing story, and I became a senior dev there a couple of years later.

My most personal rant to date...

The company I work for operates in an industry that might experience the next Kodak moment. The industry is really feeling the knife against it's throat at the moment. The company I work for is a dinosaur, so to say. And almost everyone within fight to continue staying as a dinosaur.

I am the sole dev of said company, and I am so alone. Not just literally, but also in thought and action.

I've been flagging the possibilities and dangers of the digitizing aspect we're experiencing for the last six or eight years (yep, I've been around for quite some time), but I feel that I'm not heard. I am that grumpy, sour manifestation of everything digital that they hate so much. At least that's what it feels like.

I am so fed up with this situation. But my options are limited. There aren't many dev jobs around, and those who've tried to hire me offered a salary reduction of about $12K, which is quite a lot. I've been offered jobs in other parts of the country, but I have family matters to tend to, so I can't move at the moment. I've looked for companies offering a job where I'm not required to work from the office, but in my country these seem to be far apart. I could go freelance, but I am too scared to do so. A stable income is neccessary to put food on the table for my family.

Sigh,

"I won't use javascript for this webapp where we don't use anything server-side, because I've been using php for everything"

Yeah fuck you

Not really a rant and I'm only a beginner/hobbyist, but for a few months I've been active in a local gamedev club where I recently managed the courage to approach a much more experienced (5+ years) programmer.

We managed to have a good 30 minute chat (despite not using the same programming languages) and he told me "I really appreciate talking to someone who actually understands programming and what they're talking about!"

It felt like a pretty big milestone on my path to game development, at least it feels like I know more than I care to admit to myself.

Ok I'm seriously getting sick of this shit, my new manager wants us to have the fucking 12 hour night shifts from the office for .....no reason??!! for her own fucking entertainment I suppose!

I knew the day would come where my happy times at the new job would be over, my target now is stay 3 more months so I've been there for at least a year then see what happens. fuck me.

I barely ever drink, so.. Almost every holiday party I've been in was awkward :)

there was this Christmas once where one of my family members got unexpectedly wasted and embarased me and himself in front of my newly wedded wife. A few next christmas in the fam were awkward.

There was this christmas party in my student days with othet students. Like they say, medics study hard and party hard. Everyone got wasted and fel asleep a few hours past midnight. We had lectures next morning so I didn't sleep [as I was the only one sober and had] to wake everyone up for 9am lectures. Never ever had I attended such parties since.

At even younger age [high school] I was in a new year party. Incidentaly only couples were there. Soo.. After the fireworks went off - the lights were turned off and all I could hear were kissing and other noises of this kind. Everyone's wasted ofc, but me

needless to say now I'm very picky who to celebrate with. A closest family, a glass of bubbly or some hot wine is enough and I'm comfortable with everyone.

So for context, I'm doing an Apprenticeship in IT and naturally I've been put on help desk.

I've recently been given a phone on my desk since I'm trusted enough and know enough about our software that there's no risk to me accepting calls.

I get the standard ones, a number from a different country, poorly pronouncing a co-workers name, asking if they can speak to them. I give my normal response, "I'll just check if they're in a meeting and I'll get back to you" (which they somehow always are) and ask if they would like to leave a message. They obviously don't since they're usually scams.

Since Tuesday I've started getting calls from "BT Technical Support". I don't use BT. My company doesn't use BT. So, it's clearly a scam.

Yesterday, the same guy calls me up, Thomas he says his name is. I go along with it for a while, agreeing that I've noticed our network has been slow until the point where he asks me to begin to install TeamViewer. I realise what he's going to do so I ask him what the problem with our network is.

I hear him start to respond but he stops. He's got no clue what to say, so I say to him, "Thomas mate. I think our biggest problem with our BT network is that we don't have BT."

He puts the phone down.

So I ask you for help, lovely people of devRant.

I have a Windows 10 VM ready to go. I have a couple notepad files labelled as "Passwords" and "Bank Details". What else can I throw on there to make this guy think he's hit the jackpot without really causing too much damage?

Any ideas would be appreciated. <3

// First rant
currentUser.Post(new Rant("

Quick question here, not a rant (sorry).
I heard that you need a lot of math knowledge to become a developer. Is this really true? I don't see where the math comes into play while programming (especially complex stuff). I've been studying C# for quite some time (few years) and I consider myself fairly good at it.

Never came across the need to use !basic mathematics in my projects.
I know that to study computer science at an university requires a certain result in maths, but is that all you need math for? Getting into uni?

Could somebody explain this for me? I'd really appreciate it.", "maths,university"));

I've been wondering this for a while now, but how are senior programmers able to (or at least seem to) remember all the code for all the different languages with all the different syntax?

Let me explain: From my experience there's usually two types of thinkers, there's the memorizers, and the logical thinkers. Its usually the difference between people good at history and people good at math. So considering that most programmers would need to be able to think logically (to problem solve obviously), how do they remember all this different code? I always forget the small details which I have to look back at earlier code to see how it was done (Especially annoying for written exams where we have to remember all the code and how to use it)

People who complain about wordpress have probably never tried working with Magento.

I've been going through their documentation for about 3 hours now, trying to figure out how this entire system works. And I'm no where close to understanding it...

OMG, more changes requested by a client for their website. Co-worker is wondering why they're doing these requests and is asking my boss if the design confirmation process has been skipped.

I'm a junior developer, and this is my only experience so far. I don't know shit how to deal with these stuff. I just wanna focus on development right now. Have a proper team to guide me. Be in an environment where I can get strong technical learning. I don't know how to deal with all these politics yet.

I wanna walk out but I can't. I can't be selfish to my wife and let her be the only source of income, seeing as she even has it worse and wants to get out of her workplace too. I've done it before, can't let it happen again.

Sorry for the drama. I gotta vent out.

I've had a couple of interviews that were bad because I fluffed them, but the worst was a 4 stage process I went through a while back.

Development hub for an international org, 1st stage was a phone call with high level questions. Stage 2 were online coding tests, which I passed. Third - another phone call. Finally, a visit to the office. I was informed that I was the only one to get this far after the other filtering. This is where it all went wrong.

I'd been led to believe this would be a reasonably informal chat (around an hour or so) to fill in some of the detail of what I'd already been given. It wasn't. It turned into 2+ hours of the most intense grilling I've ever had. Felt like I'd gone 12 rounds by the end. Another coding test in the middle of it. The interviewer seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to show that he knew much more than me and seemed to be trying to catch me out, rather than really discover what I knew.

By the end of it, I didn't want the job and I didn't want to report directly to someone who seemed to thrive on making life difficult to boost his own ego.

I've been a programmer for almost 19 years but I actually think the best code I've ever written is something that while it provides value to other people I'm the only one who actually uses it. In the company where I work we have major events that have to be supported by a number of different teams across about 5 time zones and each engineer has a limited set of roles that they can perform during the event. Anyway it was painful just watching people trying to create a schedule so I wrote something with Linear Programming to automatically generate the schedule. It ensures that people don't work for longer than 4 hours in a row, don't work from more than 8 hours from the first hour to the last hour on call, get 12 hours rest between engagements and the work load is evenly distributed across the team. Creating conditions in Linear Programming is weird, imagine trying to turn a series of linear equations into boolean logic, it can be done and once you can wrap your head around it it's really fun. It was my first time writing anything in it and I don't see it coming up a lot in my career. My favourite part of this project is that the end result was that engineers were less exhausted. I really hope that doesn't remain the best code I ever wrote, I don't think it will but it will require a conscious intention.

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

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

Here's my problems with this place:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

It wasn't exactly a meeting, just boss' boss coming into our office to ask about a feature. Went something like this (BB - boss' boss (or Big Bitch, whichever you prefer, Me, SP - second programmer) :

BB: Hey guys, I've got a question.

Me (without turning around since I was focused on whatever I was doing at the time) : Sure, go ahead.

BB: Could we do a country map where you would be able to click a region and get to a page with posts for that region?

Me (without pausing what I was doing) : Sure, easy. Html imagemap, or embedded flash if it's supposed to be fancy and animated.

BB: ...how would we do it?

Me (in exactly the same tone of voice, trying to mimic the same sound sample being played again) : Html imagemap, or embedded flash if it's supposed to be fancy and animated... Links leading to the same address as the filtering form for regions already goes. All that's needed is the map graphic.

BB: ...but how would we link to the correct results? Would we need to make new page for those?

Me: *sigh*

At this point SP stops doing whatever he was doing, proceeds to sit next to her by the whiteboard, and they proceed to talk about this for about 45 minutes, which to this day, I have no idea how they managed. I had no idea how they managed to stretch it for this long even as I was listening to them talking and drawing stuff on the whiteboard about it.

Afterwards, I've been reprimanded for not paying proper attention when important stuff was being solved, and a month later when I was being fired, I had been reprimanded for it once again.

Fuck that company. Fuck those people.
I have no idea how they managed to still not go bankrupt.

Got tipsy last night, hungry, saw that some of the pots I needed still needed to be washed, yada yada. Noticed that the lid of the fucking pot got broken. ... PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE AGAIN?!!! 😠

Noticed some schmoo in there (wtf is that doing in there?!), cut that out and decided to try again.. still no good, the damn handle just falls right off. Super glue to the rescue, because YOU FUCKING POT AREN'T ALLOWED TO DIE JUST YET, MOTHERFUCKER!!! 😤

So after a while of cursing, shouting in rage and repairing something for once instead of sending it in a low earth orbit, I got it back together. With the white schmoo that must've been super glue earlier as well. To fix the shit that those Swedish IKEA fuckers couldn't possibly get right!!! I don't give a shit about getting inside of a fucking lid for a cooking pot (other than for having to build the goddamn thing, wtf yo) so feel fucking free to close the damn thing down to make it last! That's where it should be closed down, unlike in fucking consumer electronics where it shouldn't!!! HOW FUCKING DIFFICULT CAN IT BE, CORPORATE AIRHEADS???!!!! 😡

... As such I vocally ranted last night in my home. Some neighbor passed by as I was raging, and he probably thinks that I've got anger issues (guess why... 😑). But I have no idea how to explain it to my neighbors, or whether I even should. Any suggestions?

I didn't leave, I just got busy working 60 hour weeks in between studying.

I found a new method called matrix decomposition (not the known method of the same name).

Premise is that you break a semiprime down into its component numbers and magnitudes, lets say 697 for example. It becomes 600, 90, and 7.

Then you break each of those down into their prime factorizations (with exponents).
So you get something like

>>> decon(697)
offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]
offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]
offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]

And it turns out that in larger numbers there are distinct patterns that act as maps at each offset (or magnitude) of the product, mapping to the respective magnitudes and digits of the factors.

For example I can pretty reliably predict from a product, where the '8's are in its factors.

Apparently theres a whole host of rules like this.
So what I've done is gone an started writing an interpreter with some pseudo-assembly I defined. This has been ongoing for maybe a month, and I've had very little time to work on it in between at my job (which I'm about to be late for here if I don't start getting ready, lol).

Anyway, long and the short of it, the plan is to generate a large data set of primes and their products, and then write a rules engine to generate sets of my custom assembly language, and then fitness test and validate them, winnowing what doesn't work.

The end product should be a function that lets me map from the digits of a product to all the digits of its factors.

It technically already works, like I've printed out a ton of products and eyeballed patterns to derive custom rules, its just not the complete set yet. And instead of spending months or years doing that I'm just gonna finish the system to automatically derive them for me. The rules I found so far have tested out successfully every time, and whether or not the engine finds those will be the test case for if the broader system is viable, but everything looks legit.

I wouldn't have persued this except when I realized the production of semiprimes *must* be non-eularian (long story), it occured to me that there must be rich internal representations mapping products to factors, that we were simply missing.

I'll go into more details in a later post, maybe not today, because I'm working till close tonight (won't be back till 3 am), but after 4 1/2 years the work is bearing fruit.

Also, its good to see you all again. I fucking missed you guys.

Hey hens I'm back on my crack.

How have you all been? Tell me what I've missed (presumably not much as you've all been locked indoors for a while now but hey ho)

I'll be handed a paper soon that says I can write code so I have that going for me (that's also where I've been for the past while)

Anyone else ever just have those days where you just think of just giving up on programming all together?

I just seem to be having these days every second day or so, I mean I've been programming since I was 11 and I'm just about to turn 21... I've essentially stuck with game development in the same engine in the same language and to this day have nothing to show for the past 10 years other than a million half assed prototypes that seem to just rehash idea's already done by other but a million times better...

Tried learning other languages and none have stuck, I can't grasp C++, don't have a fucking clue how to use Vala and can't even think of anything to make with said languages...

Tried making a pushbullet front end in Vala and can't even learn how to use the fucking API's so once again, that project has been put on the shelf with everything else.

It all just drags me down and makes me think if all the trouble is worth the pain and annoyance.

Maybe I'm feeling sorry for myself (110% chance this is the case) or maybe I'm just not cut out to be a programmer...

Random thought of the day. I'm sure I've been told the "common wisdom" is that you can take a job with a lower salary and enjoy a better work-life balance, or go gung-ho for the inner city jobs and earn way more but sacrifice your quality of life.

Anyone else found the complete opposite? The higher the salary I've had over my career, generally the *better* the working environment and the more the employer seems to care for, and value its employees. Not universally true I'm sure, and perhaps I'm just lucky about where I pick, but I've certainly had way more "high stress" situations in some of my lower paid, rather than higher paid roles.

This is my first and current Rant/story so here it goes, I've been working for a company for past 10months now, where i was interviewed on Java, then i was put into mobile development and started to build an app in swift (successfully finished it) after two months i was working on ARKIT(didn't build anything BIG mostly R&D), then started working on React-native and built an app from scratch using firebase as backend (both RN and firebase was new to me) and pushed it to AppStore and PlayStore, and currently i'm working on Flutter!.. At first it was pretty irritating switching frameworks and technologies but now i've become more positive about it and i look at it as an opportunity to learn new stuff :)

Today I got corrected in the difference between to and too. Another dev told me I made a typo in the documentation where I tripple checked. Then he told me that "too"means "also" and is also used in things like "too much". In high school I got told by my teacher it was "to much".

I've been using the word "to" wrong for fourteen years now...

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.

Bad managers, rude clients and annoying colleagues...

A lot of the stories here I read have at least any of the words listed above. My advice to most of you guys is: LEAVE.

And do it NOW.

The thing is, most of the stuff you're complaining about won't change. And you will be stuck there longer than you want to be and/or notice, trust me i've been there.

Especially the rude client part is where I've had lots of experience in, you have to search for a company which will abstract that layer for you. If you're on here most likely you're a developer and not everybody is a team lead. So why the F in hell are you even in conversations about budget and/or are you doing the most of the talking in the retrospective? If your project manager is ANY good he is doing that all for you.
There is so much to choose from (my experience in western countries) so please dont be stuck in a dead end job. Or start freelancing or whatever..

Not particularly dev related but I do need to rant.

Parents are here to visit, it's lovely to see them. Unfortunately I have a small ass 1 bed flat because rent and house prices are stupid high where I work. I'm sleeping in the living room on an air bed, the fridge/freezer is noisy and about 3 foot from my head so I've been turning it off over night. It didn't get plugged in this morning so shit's getting thrown out. I sleep maybe 5 hours, wake up at 1 too hot, 4 too cold then mother comes in at 6 with the dogs. 3rd night of this. I've taken holiday even though I don't have much to spare because there's no way in fuck I can work feeling like this, I'm a dev and need to be able to think and do intelligent things ffs.

It's nice to see family but it's nice to have my own space too.

I think I've been doing too much Android programming in the last three days.

Had a lucid dream last night where I couldn't wake up until I figured out how to set up an inter-thread latch that would allow me to process through a shit ton of data points in parallel without duplication or skipping errors in the most efficient manner (effectively no blocking). We're talking several hundred lines of code. Slept 14 hours last night, I heard my alarm but didn't wake up. When I finally got up, I did what I did in my dream and it worked better than the existing code.

Turns out my brain is great at Java evaluation now, I guess.

Einstein supposedly has a quote attributed to him: "Perfection isn't achieved when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove."

I find that I aggressively refactor code where I can to only what is absolutely required. It does also have the knock on effect of reducing scope of bugs, when the code is smaller there's only so many places bugs can be.

Tesla claimed to have the ability to create designs in his head and only built things once he was satisfied that it worked in theory first, now it's rare I can do that, but I will use a repl to prototype or test modules in isolation before just hacking on the actual code.

Jobs, I mean, I know he didn't code but he was always insisting on designs that looked good and was generally uncompromising in his design centric view.

My friend, she was my Starbucks barista for a while but I've slowly been teaching her code and she's taught me a lot about how to teach others to code, she also happens to be my favourite student.

Looking around where I work, I'm reminded of when I was young and ambitious, like all the other kids around me at the time, with a dislike for all the older dudes and dudettes in upper management. With the exception of three other guys around my age, everyone, including the CEO, was in high school, middle school, elementary school, or not even born yet when I started my career. Just like them, I was plucky and chatty and (trying to be) funny and social. I didn't know how fast I would go from that set to the old fat guy that they look askance at and wonder how I'm still around with my weird ways and "boomerish", socially retarded behavior. What's really galling is that I'm solidly Gen X, like some of them, but I guess I talk more like a Boomer because my parents were older when I was born and I was kinda raised in that mindset. I'm the office schlub now. A man out of my time. And I've never been in any kind of upper management, even. I am Kevin Malone.

I love it when asshats, that wear testicles for sunglasses, like to ask me a question about my past experience with a given technology. Let's call it "X". After I've said my piece about the desired effect "X" was supposed to achieve, and describe the environment/scope where "X" was used, and describe the pain points I've encountered with it or the headaches "X" has caused in those environments, these camel spunk garglers then try to immediately rebut me by saying that every one of the times they've set "X" technology up it's worked just fine.

So, I kindly remind them that my past experience was in large enterprises where "X" technology just doesn't scale well so I've seen some issues with it.

Spunk Gargler: "Hmmm, must've just not been setup correctly."

I lose my shit (internally of course because I can't afford to be without a job right now.) and say, "I'm not so sure that it wasn't setup correctly, I just don't think that 'X' works properly at the scale of 500+ employee environments well. You've only ever set it up in small offices of like - what, 20 users?"

Shitlord McHerp-a-Derp who's Drunk on Spunk: "Maybe, but it just sounds like a bad configuration was causing those issues to me."

He shuffled back into his office shortly after I basically told him he's a fucking chump playing small team tactics and I've seen shit at scale so I've seen first hand what does and does not work well.

I'm writing this because this is the same fucking imbecile that has only ever encountered a /23 network once before from a client they inherited from a previous MSP team and they didn't know how to "safely change it" to a /24 so they just left it in place.

(BTW, just for the non-networking guys/gals out there, I'm sure you've already guessed it, but a /23 network is NOT a fucking problem!)

These puffy cancerous taint boils that call themselves IT engineers are the fucking problem!

I'm not a dev by trade or training, but trying to learn DevOps, and I can totally see why Dev teams can/sometimes get pissed with infrastructure teams... infrastructure/helpdesk side of IT is full of these fucking meat heads.

Been using Snapchat for a while.
But yesterday I uninstalled it. Since morning, while using YouTube, I've been getting advertisements to install Snapchat. Where is the privacy?

There's little irritations that happen when working with clients over time that let you know that they're stuck in the past and definitely not the kind of client you want to have long term.

My personal favorite example:

"Can we put an icon that shows the weather on the banner of the website?"

Note: I don't make "websites," information portals, content pieces, etc.

It doesn't to matter what type of application it is; time tracking, HR, mortgage application, industrial control system, etc. I don't know why, but every single client I've ever had where I've been saddled with one or more people who have no business being anywhere near the term "stakeholder" asked for this stupid, banal, 1995 web portal fuckery. Their shitty little mushroom stamp contribution wasting everyone's time.

What's worse, they want it be prominent in the screen real estate. It can't just be a responsibly sized waste of space like the screenshot's top example (from a company whose entire business is weather, nonetheless). No, it has to be the busiest fucking thing in the control space, as in the example inferior.

Or maybe I'm just wrong and people desperately want to know if the sky is going to piss on them if they leave the cave.

Anyone else have a pet peeve in regards to recurrent, pointless functionality?

I'm a fan of Linux, and have used many distros (arch, ubuntu, debian, fedora, mint, centos, rhl) and many desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, xfce, Enlightenment) before asking this question.

But every single one of these desktop environments always have felt slow to respond in some cases, where I click something and it doesn't open/close immediately, or i double click something but it fails to open or select something. basically I'm not confident my actions on the GUI will have guaranteed, quick responses within reasonable time. I've never ever had this issue with Microsoft OSes (keeping aside the many badly coded softwares which hang or crash). I'm not talking about specific softwares, this is just general usage of opening settings and using the file manager, window menus.

I'm pretty sure my hardware is not the issue. I've run everything on the same rig. And this has always kept me from fully committing myself to a Linux distro. But I can never be sure about display drivers, as they're not identical. But the issues in Linux has been noted by me for many years. So I doubt it's the drivers either.

Is there anybody who agrees with me and know why Linux is the way it is like that, or is this just me facing this annoyance?

I am in a ranting mood today.

I HATE "day in the life of a SWE" videos. Especially the ones where they work from home.

They basically show that they sleep/eat all day and get very little done. I know it's for entertainment or comedic effect but it makes me uneasy about the image that they are projecting to the world.

People already don't think we deserve the salary that we make and when they see these videos the idea gets re-enforced into their heads.

I've been working from home for 3 years and my day is NOTHING like what these content creators show in their videos. It's a bunch of meetings and a lot of coding with very little rest.

I don't understand how my managers suddenly forgot that my "down weeks" we're due to technical debt I inherited. The whole on boarding hasn't been in my favor. I've stayed at work everyday til long after work hours, digging through code, trying to get JIRA tickets done, encountering issues specific to our code base that no one would ever discover on their own without docs/help from the original dev. The whole time, I was told that they know what's going on and apologize. I constantly expressed that plenty of what we were doing was building on antipatterns. They acknowledged. When a ticket wasn't done, they always knew the very specific reason and I wasn't faulted. 6 months in, I receive a great annual review. 7 months in? I receive an email titled "Performance Discussion," detailing 4 of those incidents where a ticket was pushed back -- with inaccurate depictions of what actually went down. They actually wrote that I didn't communicate. One part of the report expressed that there were "bugs found in production due to inadequate test coverage." WTF!! Everything made it past code review and QA. What are you talking about?? In fact, the person who wrote that merged my code in each time!!!! Insane!! Anyway, Q2 is partly about cleaning up technical debt, which is a responsibility I have been vested (fantastic). I've deleted about 800 lines of code in the last 2 weeks and added plenty of doc strings. Two of the most important modules our application works from are about 1000 lines of JavaScript each without any comments/docs. I'm changing that, but I don't know if my managers truly know the significance. Someone was recently promoted to my position but manually wrote out a sorting algorithm (specified numeric indexes and all); didn't do shit to earn it but breathe. And while they get more and more praise and responsibility, I'm over here stuck trying to prove myself and live up to why I assume they hired me. It's ridiculous. I love the company, but I'm not getting any sleep and I'm stressed out. It's only been about 7 months and I've been doing everything I can. Why is this happening? What am I doing wrong? I've been developing a recurring (physical) headache and ticks. My heart/chest area sometimes feels like it's lifting weights. I sound like an idiot, pushing so hard for a company that isn't mine, but I take so much pride in being in this position, and I'm so set on proving myself this early in my career (I'm 25).

So I've created this account specifically for this rant. I usually just browse anonymously.

I've recently been hired in a big company that is one of the biggest Microsoft users in the world and my essentially revolves on making it easier for our collaborators to work with SharePoint (and other ms software)

Never in my life have I hit that much of a roadblock. So for the past week I've been trying to integrate what Ms calls webparts. And to modify the default webparts Ms provides you need to their properties (or Metadata). Except here's the big problem these are NOT documented anywhere (unless I failed to find it, if you do know where it is documented please HMU), so I've found myself trying to reverse engineer the js scripts that are served with SharePoint to figure out what the webpart properties are called and what type of data they are! I've been going through endless github repos using the CSOM nuget package (it's the library everyone uses to interact with SharePoint) and I finally found out about this other library called PnP which is a wrapper around CSOM that makes it easier to use. That wrapper has a way for me to load existing page and look at the properties of existing webparts. So here I thought it was the end of my suffering and I could finally get an idea of what it should be. Turns out this method doesn't work because one of the dependencies it has has had breaking changes and they still updated it even though it breaks their code! So for the past two days I've been trying random combinations of key values with different data types and json serialization methods.

Oh and yeah I've also looked at all the http calls via the chrome network tab, the metadata is not served as an individual file but is computed by Ms servers when they're serving you their html files.

So uh yeah run from CSOM if you can..

I work with a designer who provides me with the mockups of the websites we do where I work. We use Figma, which is a tool similar to Sketch. I do design myself and with this tool is quite easy to mockup sites.

This designer is the worst person I've ever met in terms of document organization. He never organizes the layers of the documents, or even cares to assign names to each layer. It's not that hard with simple designs but when it comes to develop a full website it becomes awful.

I've been asking him politely to organice those documents into layers and groups for almost three years to which he never does.

I'm not able to find the proper words to ask again politely and when I do, he just puts the layers without order into a bunch of groups and calls the job done.

How hard is to be a bit emphatic to your coworkers and spend 5 minutes of your time making their life easier?

Bought a new 1TB ssd from Intel for my laptop. The installation of the drive itself went perfectly, it works like a charm. But then I had to do a clean install of windows and ubuntu, and that's where things went wrong. The drive still works perfectly, but everything else has fallen apart. I've been fighting with them the whole working day and haven't got anything work related done. Well, a few more hours and I can head home and continue the installation with a few cold beers, that should help getting it done ;)

So, i've noticed something:

- My grandfather drinks nothing but the water.
- My grandmother recently increased her water intake due to meds making her retain water way less
- My dad has been drinking more water in an attempt to be healthier.
- I don't drink the house water without boiling it first, as i'm the only one that thinks it smells and tastes like wet dog smells, aside from with like kool-aid or similar where the taste is masked enough to not be detectable.

Well, what does this matter? I'll tell you:
- My grandfather went from fine aside from minor balance issues to totally mentally fried in 24 hours.
- My grandmother is spacing out while driving and falling more and more.
- My dad went from fine to overwhelmed by basic decisions in a couple months of moving here.
- I've noticed a slight decline in my mental health, but this is probably from issues i've had with my college and general stress.

Correlation ≠ causation, but... it's usually-unfiltered water from a well placed uncomfortably close to a lagoon, and it was never tested for safety before use (despite my protests.)

Why isn't this ready for testing yet?

Could it be that despite multiple meetings emails and face to face conversations none of you have provided me with what I actually need?

Yes I can create you new email and SMS campaigns. But I need two little things first.
1 The template text.
2 The sign off forms from compliance

Without them I can't do shit. So stop chasing me on where we're at because I've been chasing you on this for two weeks.

This shit here is why I'm the grumpy It guy.

Not quite a rant, but looking for opinion/advice.

I have been programming for a little over a year now, excluding those cringy Lua scripting days with if statement hell. I'm pretty far ahead most of the people in my course (1st year Software Engineering), but I'm at this awkward point where I know quite a bit but not enough. All of my projects so far have been small 1-2 source file programs, mostly in javascript although Python is my main hoe. At the moment I'm reading a book on machine learning and I feel like I'm doing fine, not struggling too much with it, but I don't feel confident at all in my abilities. I had two programming internship interviews half a year ago, both of which I wasn't accepted in. I've been thinking of contributing to an open source project lately to get some "real world" experience but I can't find a good project to start with and just don't feel like I'm good enough. There are also a lot of small things I come across such as async and coroutines in Python which I'm not familiar with yet and they make my confidence drop even lower. I'm guessing most of you have been in a similar position. Would you have any advice for me? Should I search for a project or should I keep on studying with books?

I think I did it. I did the thing I set out to do.

let p = a semiprime of simple factors ab.
let f equal the product of b and i=2...a inclusive, where i is all natural numbers from 2 to a.
let s equal some set of prime factors that are b-smooth up to and including some factor n, with no gaps in the set.
m is a the largest primorial such that f%m == 0, where
the factors of s form the base of a series of powers as part of a product x
1. where (x*p) = f
2. and (x*p)%f == a

if statement 2 is untrue, there still exists an algorithm that
3. trivially derives the exponents of s for f, where the sum of those exponents are less than a.
4. trivially generates f from p without knowing a and b.

For those who have followed what I've been trying to do for so long, and understand the math,
then you know this appears to be it.

I'm just writing and finishing the scripts for it now.

Thank god. It's just in time. Maybe we can prevent the nuclear apocalypse with the crash this will cause if it works.

Last week I got told by an incoming CTO, a week old to the organisation, that I'm good for nothing and unable to produce any work. He told me that he'll replace me and put me in a team where I'm more resourceful as I have been consistently underperforming. (He doesn't understand data science yet fyi) Then, he informed he's hiring 5 new teams members.

Me (junior data scientist) being really passionate about work was shook to hear this. So much so that it took me a week to even recover from it. I have considered counselling sessions too.

Week later, 5 new team members decide to flip his offer and not join. Another existing senior member decides to leave as well. Meanwhile, major issues in existing systems emerge and only I could solve the same. Still haven't heard back any from him though.

Is this the industry standard though ? Is this how CTOs normally function ? Throwing shit at people without knowing their value or valuing their efforts ? Especially with junior developers. It's only been 2 years in this profession and I've not met more than 3 genuine and helpful people. Maybe it's just my organization.

There are times where I would be debugging during one of my (high school) classes, and I would finally find that bug that I've been looking into for days, and I would then involuntarily yell out something like "Oh! That shouldn't be there!", and everybody would start staring at me. It really pissed off the teachers.

I've been laughed at a lot for thinking this way, but I'm honestly frustrated by how little information exists on the web for people who want to take Operating System development a step further. I mean, the OSDev Community is amazing and offers pretty, much everything one needs to know at the system level. But my issue is: What if someone didn't want to use existing compilers and assemblers like GCC and NASM, and do everything from total scratch? I mean, the original Unix came from somewhere, right? I know you're going to think "Why not? It works.". Well, I just think it's crazy how few people (such as Linus and the GNU foundation) are out there that have the ability to create such things without help from existing software tools. Sure, it could take me decades of careful practice and experience, but my passion is for creating software at this level and becoming one of those people is very strong. I just wish I knew where to begin and who to learn from.

One thing when working with a ton of data:
If there is a slight, infinitesimal probability that something will be wrong, then it will 100% be wrong.

Never make assumptions that data is consistent, when dealing with tens of gigabytes of it, unless you get it sanitized from somewhere.

I've already seen it all:
* Duplicates where I've been assured "these are unique"
* In text fields that contain exclusively numeric values, there will always be some non-numeric values as well
* There will be negative numbers in "number sequences starting with 1"
* There will be dates in the future, and in the far far future, like 20115 in the future.
* Even if you have 200k customers, there will be a customer ID that will cause an integer overflow.

Don't trust anything. Always check and question everything.

At the moment I'm working on a project where every line of code is actually garbage. However, the client insists on continuing to use ZF1.

Zend_Locale is a mess. I've been sitting on it for five hours and nothing's working.

Samsung Smart TV becomes Samsung Dumb TV.

Welcome back dear readers, to the next installment of my Raspberry Pi / Pi Hole / MitM box adventure!

For those of you who are new to this story, I'm a long experience programmer who knows very little about his home network or networking in general and has constantly been going over his 250GB data plan because 'rona, and thus, wants answers to "where is the data going".

So, I got the Pi, codenamed Mini-Beowolf, positioned between the modem and router... worked some fuckin systemd.networkd magic (which was sort of easy... but was hard cause I'm new to it) and viola, this son of a bitch passes through the ethernet and doesn't even show up on the router. Fu-King Beastly, I love it.

Now to static IP all my devices so I fire up my trusty TP-Link admin portal. I should add here... I've visited this admin about a total of 10 minutes prior to this when I set this wifi router up and just let it do DHCP.

So I'm getting to know my admin portal... I've got most of my devices connected to reserved IPs... and I find this one fuckin device reporting as "localhost".

Now, I've got a MAMP install... but it hasn't been running. But still I thought for sure it was just MAMP run a bit amok.

But no... it was my fucking Samsung "Smart" TV. That piece of shit is, and apparently has been reporting its device name as, sure as shit, fucking "localhost"... PROBABLY FOR YEARS.

Now, IDK how that didn't cause me any major problems over the years, and I read quite a few forums about people who it did mess up their network. So I resolved to rename the Samsung TV device.

I found the spot in the network settings of the TV... I changed the name from the pick list of rooms in a house like "Living Room" and "Bed Room", then I tried entering my own device name. But no matter what I picked, or no matter how many times I restarted/reset that TV the network name is ALWAYS "localhost".

Even though somehow my network survived this long... I'm not standing for that shit.

My Samsung TV is now blocked COMPLETELY at the router level. (After I ran one last factory reset and update)

The kicker? That Pi I built has a Samsung SSD... so I'm blocking Samsung WITH FUCKING SAMSUNG.

Needless to say, these are likely among my last Samsung purchases.

Join me next time when I FINALLY try to turn Pi Hole on and then get a tcpdump (or some other lesser output from the tcp stream) going.

I can't believe I've been here for a year already. Where has the time gone?

Well, here's to another year of ranting with like-minded people!

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

I've been using C, C++ and Python for 10+ years and suddenly I moved to a new job where I had to learn and use JavaScript.
I think that it is different, as many say, but it is full of lacks and it's like a pile of hacks to make things work. It's a scripting language used as a programming language. What do you think about it?

I think I've reached the point where I've been programming for so long that I have off by one errors doing normal math by hand. Nothing more humbling than getting beat out to a bunch of simple math problems to a grade schooler.

!rant but kinda.
!dev but also dev

Hello, my name is ***** and I already had a few Old Fashions🥃

I've been chasing a big career and success since i was about 12.. the first 8 years of my career I did the same.
for the last two years i decided to slow down, I'm still keeping up with stuff and do a good job but I took a break from wanting to being the next Wozniak.

Im much happier and more relaxes now but I'm at a point where i really wanna do, be and achieve more..

My #1 goal in life is to build a family, having a wife and a few kids. (first gotta be able to talk to women though:/)

i have a very strong desire to have an impact on the world and society to build a life in which at least my (non existing) family could be happy and without worries. but i've no fucking clue how to achieve that. how to have an impact. i don't see a way as a software engineer anymore..

i feel lonely and lost without any fucking perspectives..

i feel like i was better off when i was chasing the big money..

i know dev rant is not the place to do this but i can't talk to my family and i wanted to share my emotions. been alone for 3 months now and it's also about my dev career, that's how i justify to post this to our community here😅

This is going to sound stupid to some.. I recently finished sololearns JavaScript course and I loved it but I want to learn more but I have no idea where to start.. I've been browsing tutorials on YouTube but it doesn't help too much.. does anyone have any suggestions?

!rant

So I've been using Linux as my desktop and server environment for a solid month now, and I think the biggest benefit it's been for me is the digitial detoxification. I no longer worry about having the biggest/most high spec computer anymore and instead my OS is built around getting as much clutter and distractions out of the way so I can focus on programming as much as possible. It's very much akin to my mediatation sessions where you cut out everything around you to regain your focus.

It's the same feeling I got when I lost interest in video games. it was a huge time sink that was entertaining yes, but it no longer gives me the same feeling of accomplishment as getting over the mountain of a project goal and reaching the summit. Linux is a more challenging environment but with that challeng comes the excitement of learning something new, and your environment is in your own hands.

It's been a while but I should go back to my buddist meditation group again. I've been a workaholic for the past couple months and I need to afford myself time again to decompress.

How did you start learning to program? I've been teaching myself where ever I can and changed my major, but I feel like I could be learning more in less time. Any tips?

I'm rewriting a game from C++ to C just for the purpose of learning and adding more features, however; after I refactored the code, the game broke with a segmentation fault and I have no idea where the memory issue is.

I've been debugging for hours now and I've got nothing. FML

It completely changed the course of my life!
I started learning to code because I was curious how mobile apps works. I blew through my self guided learning and needed more. Flash forward two years and I am working as a web developer! My projects are challenging but I've been learning insanely fast and I can't wait to see where I am two years from now.

I'm just finishing my bachelor's degree in computer science in Germany. I love programming, especially for Android. I am working on a really cool note-taking app for my bachelor thesis and I love. A few weeks ago I started looking for jobs, I thought this would be easy. Why is this not easy?! Does no company need help with developing an app?!?! I googled jobs and opened the first few pages on the browser then I chose a city in Switzerland because I read that's where developers make the most money. Then I had to write a CV, what the fuck am I supposed to write in the CV?! So I wrote what languages I had dealt with during my studies and I wrote that I now speak German English and Hebrew. I had to upload the CV for EVERY SINGLE COMPANY and sometimes I had to write a cover letter for a companies I don't even know much about. WHY IS THIS SO ANNOYING!!!
I'm the last few weeks I've been getting emails rejecting my application, such a waste of time. I would love to work with people I'm just so bored sitting at home all day without much motivation to program alone, I need company and a company to pay me. I've already wasted a few months and I just can't believe that the market is so terribly organised. I could be getting so much work done, all I need is people who are a little bit motivated! I'm just so frustrated that everything works so slowly in this market...I even tried looking online for people who just want to talk about programming Android apps, NADA I just couldn't find anything... Well that's it if you have a job offer for me just hit me up I'll do anything...tiny.cc/chagai is where you can find my contact information I will literally consider even working in North Korea I just don't care where I work..

Manager: Tell me what you are looking for in your job, I know this from your coworkers, but not you.
Me: I honestly don't know anymore. After all this time my motivation is gone and I don't know where I'm going.
Manager: If you could go back to school knowing all you know now, what would you do?
Me:...
Me: I don't know.
Manager: maybe try to think about that.

He doesn't realize I've been thinking about this for years.
I stopped caring at some point and just act.
I didn't tell him I was looking for a new job because any energy I had left is being consumed by this company.

Wouldn't call it a software bug but related:

Was developing an order system to expand in the UK. We have been developing it for the last 2 years and always had a one nasty bug in the system... Whatever we do, it still appears... Tried debugging to find the source, tried covering with tests - nothing helped it was still there. We even rewrote the whole system 3 times and it still was there!

One day, we have been given a stupid request from our manager - take a black background and make it even more blacker... That was it and I went to the CEO with letter where I stated that we should remove the manager... As I'm the Senior there, he did ask me why and eventually removed the manager...

Oh my guys, I've never felt so good after removing a bug! Since then - our application went live, we had our first customers and we were happily rolling new updates. And the best part - there was no BUG! Everything we did just had undocumented features or missing links but we haven't really had a single bug that was not caught by our automated tests!

---

Moral of the story:
Not only software can have bugs. People also can be "bugs" while bugging you about every single details they think is not working correctly.

Since I started working at my current job, I've been growing to admire agile development more and more (or the ideal at least) to the point where I manage my LIFE with an agile perspective now!

It honestly works so well! 😁

I see a lot of talk about complex numbers, and yet
for all they are worth, I have not once been
able to find an explaination on how to calculate
them by hand, namely the real component.
For example
(-5)**0.5
(1.3691967456605067e-16+2.23606797749979j)

2.23606 is obviously just the square root of 5, but where the hell did 1.369 come from?

Apparently no one fucking knows, and no site I've found gives a simple explanation for someone new to math in general.

"use a calculator", "hit a button",

How about no.

The best happened today.

These past 2 weeks have been shit. People wronged me big time, got thrown under the bus for shit that the people behind refused to own up to it. Took that shit because I just couldn't be bothered to fucking argue.

I'm the only dev on this project and we're so close to release so I bit my tongue and took it on the chin but it's been eating me alive since then.

The tipping point was yesterday. 5 people failed to communicate shit properly amongst themselves on all channels got me forced to be the last one finishing work yesterday 4 hours after everyone left. I had every right to refuse and leave on time but again, we're so close to release and I don't want to see this project fail.

But see, I got angry. So fucking angry that nothing else has been on my mind since yesterday.

I don't take out my anger at others, that's not who I am (moslty) so today I was at work and secluded myself from everyone else otherwise I would've exploded in someone's face.

I was also supposed to meet up with friends tonight but with all this shit going on I decided not to go because I would not have been fun to be around.

Left work on time today, fell asleep on the train because I am too exhausted.

When I was about to walk into my house I noticed this little super cute puppy following me. I had no idea where or how long he's been behind me as I was walking home but he seemed way too happy when I saw him. His tail wagging like he's excited to see me even though I have never seen him. I petted him, played a bit with him. He seemed to be the happiest dog ever 😁. He managed to put a smile on my face for the first time in the last few days.

He then ran away.. I guess he got bored 😅

I am feeling so much better now all because of this little puppy 🐶. I'm so glad I ran into him because I've been smiling since then.

I wish I had took a picture of him 😥

Doggo, you probably won't read this, but thanks mate you made my month in those few minutes 🤘

If you have a dog, go pet him and appreciate how much happiness they bring in your life. If you have a cat.. Uhh I don't know... Uhh pray it doesn't kill you in your sleep I guess?

Thanks for reading

There's this weird situation where someone rants about their work situation and commenters dive in with suggestions and comments about what they should and shouldn't do without knowing all the details.

It really pisses me off not just when it happens to me, but I see other posters using devrant here as impromptu group therapy only to be bombarded with "do x or suggest to your boss...".

Now... I've been suggesting and asking the same thing to my boss for over a year, still no change. I'm demotivated because of the lack of progress, I can and do keep bringing it up with him. However having someone here (presumably well meaning) suggest basically the same thing doesn't help, it just reminds me of the frustrating situation.

When this place is supportive its great, when we're all second guessing each other it's frustrating.

Can we all be just a little more excellent to each other? I know I'll try to be. Instead of assuming someone hasn't done x or y, I'll try to be a little more supportive and assume that the most obvious things to try, has been tried.

Oh that time,

When I nearly hit the 48h.
With two 04-14h shifts without ANY break and constant crying from my colleagues.
And that flat movement of a friend in between. Where nobody did shit and I had to carry the washing machine one story downstairs. Alone. Because the other participants did not want to hurt their hands. Yeah.
In the breaks at home I ate and went on gaming, that pushed up I've been.

Those were the days in west Germany 'industrial centre' dip shit.
The war zones on humanity that piss me off.
And there still are those greedy pigs working off their asses, licking cunts for coins and mistreating their subordinates and families with 15 children (alternatively their BMW 3xx's) and partying 'friends' they only know by consuming the most industrial waste radioactive gym work out fist fucker 8000 *tm

Yeah.
Those were the days

Holy mother of butts. Two weeks. Two weeks I've been on and off trying to get hardware rendering to work in xorg on a laptop with an integrated nvidia hybrid gpu.

I know the workarounds and it's what I've been using otherwise. Nouveau without power management or forced software rendering works fine. I also know it's a known issue, this is just me going "but what the hell, it HAS to be possible".

The kicker is that using nvidias official tools will immediately break it and overwrite your xorg.conf with an invalid configuration.

I've never bought an nvidia gpu but all my work laptops have had them. Every time i set one up I can't resist giving this another shot, but I always hit a brick wall where everything is set up right but launching X produces a black screen where I can't even launch a new tty or kill the current one. I assume it's the power management tripping over itself.

The first time I tried getting this to work was about 3 or 4 years ago on a different laptop and distro. It's not a stretch to say that it would be better if nvidia just took down their drivers for now to save everyone's time.

?

I am working as intern with a super cool startup. I love working here.

But, for the past few days I've been busy with college, exams stuff. This has affected my work severely. I'm constantly past deadlines etc.. The startup understands the fact and also puts no pressure on me for to show up every day and decreased my workload.

College work will be the same for the next two months. I don't want to underperform at the company, at the same time cant do away with my college too.

It's like a relationship where you love the girl a lot but are genuinely too busy to spend time with her.

I'm meeting my supervisor today. I need a subtle way to let him know of the same. I know this would mean me leaving the company, but I want to join them back after two months. Or at least be a work from home, part time employee.

I'm in serious need of some help.

I'm going through a rough time in my relationship, switching my job next month and moving to a new place because I didn't have shit to do at my current job and I just always felt like I was wasting my time at this job. I've been feeling very low and unsatisfied with my life over the past few months. It feels as if I'm constantly abusing myself in my mind, comparing myself to my older self and my past when things were better both professionally and personally for me. I don't feel motivated to work on my personal projects or learn anything new. I don't know what to do anymore or where to get motivation from. It almost feels like the part inside of me which I liked the most is dead. I don't understand what's wrong with me.

Almost everyone here has shared a story about their boss whether bad or good at some point in their time on devRant. Here's mine.

I started out in my current company around mid third year in college. I have been doing freelance for about six years which is why I think my boss hired me.

I couldn't be more thankful for these last 10 months in this company, every experience has been epic. Since my boss knows my future plans and how I hope to build my own company some day, my boss has been mentoring me ever since I've knew him.

Last week he even offered to take me along with him and certain other members of our team to the US to meet with a client of ours. (I have nothing to do with the client, he just offered the trip for the heck of it.)

I can't wait to see where my time with this company will lead me.

We basically don't unit test at work. I write some tests for my code and honest to God people complain I'm wasting time saying a test bed and manual tests are good enough. We don't write test beds for about half of our production code and rely on integration tests for the rest. We only test release builds which have been symbol stripped, I get handed a crash report with no stack trace that I'm unable to reproduce and expected to stay late to fix it for some arbitrary internal deadline.

I've since moved to R&D where basically I'm left to do my own thing so it's better.

We don't project manage. Project leads take time estimates and double them so management might cut them some slack. This doesn't matter because management made up time estimates before the project started. Last project I was on had a timeline of 3 months and took a year.

We have released broken products. Not that any of the above really matters, our software products have made about 50k revenue in 2 years. There are 6 people on software. Fortunately hardware has made about 3 mill. That said our hardware customers are getting frustrated with us as we keep fucking up, shipping broken products and missing deadlines.

I've been working there about a year and a half and will be looking for a job at the end of the current project.

I joined devRant about when I was most pissed off with my job, my rant frequency has definitely gone down since I moved over to R&D.

Debating on whether to quit my job.

Part of the reason it's hard for me to make a decision is there are a lot of good things about my job:

- almost all the projects we work on are blue sky; no technical debt anywhere
- great teammates; people help each other out and generally there's a good vibe
- reasonable boss; he's totally fine with me managing my own schedule, and since I get my work done, he basically never questions when and where I work
- about 1 hour of corporate meetings each week
- best healthcare I've ever had; basically everything is paid for
- 3 weeks PTO & all major US holidays
- free food; generally healthy office snacks and such

So why would I want to quit this environment?

- I hardly get to code anymore. About 2 years ago, I got asked if I would mind helping spec out projects. Since then, I've moved from writing code related to projects to helping my teammates understand the business situation so they can build the right thing.
- I'm in lots of meetings. So we have very few meetings for the company itself. We have a bunch of customer meetings, though. And progressively, I've getting pulled into meetings where there's really no reason for me to be there, aside from "we should have a technical person present."
- The sales people are getting tired of turning down clients that our product isn't targeted for. So they're progressively pushing to make products in those areas. Unfortunately, I'm the only one on the engineering team has any experience in that other tech stack. Also, the team really, really don't want to learn it because it's old tech that's on its way out.
- The PM group is continuously in shambles. Turnover there has averaged 100% annually for about 5 years. Honestly, IMO, it's because they're understaffed. However, there has been 0 real motion to fix this other than talk. This constant turnover has made it so that the engineering team has had to become the knowledge base for all clients.
- My manager has put me on the management track, but has been very slow to hand off anything. I'm the team supervisor, and I have been since the beginning of the year formally. When the supervisor quit last year, it basically became obvious to me that I was considered the informal supervisor after that. However, I can't hire or fire; I can't give a review; I don't have any budget; I can't authorize time off. So what do I do now? Oh, I'm the person that my boss comes to ask about my co-workers performance for the purpose of informing promotion/termination/pay increases. That's it. I'm a spy.

I have got so much stuff to learn.

I have had little to no experience with Python and JavaScript and was planning to learn the lot during my holidays. Where I'm from, we have a huge ass festival this weekend. So holidays for a couple weeks, at least. Probably the biggest festival in our country. And for the last two months, I had my exams. So no learning back then either. I have so many tabs open to learn stuff but I don't seem to get the time.

So for the last 4-5 days, I've been cleaning the house, top to bottom because its the holidays, the only time I stay home and free. It sucks to do it alone. My parents are getting old and get all sorts of back pain and shit upon little physical effort. So I should get all the stuffs done.

Yesterday, I finally finished my chores at 10 in the evening. But by the time the chores were finished, I was finished too. *sigh* I guess I shall find some time soon.

It's rather surreal to go from months of momentum, hard work, feeling proud of everything we're doing... to walking into work one day and finding out that it's your last. It's everyone's last.

Startups, I get it. They come and go, but I've never been so blindsided by it when everything seemed great and everyone was proud. Oh well.

Not skipping a beat. My first day at a new opportunity begins in the morning. I hope it isn't too long before I once again find that place where I'm doing my best work, building something I genuinely believe in, and feel great about it all.

I can't say how rare that groove actually is. I hope it isn't. We should all be able to find it.

You know, I've really been thinking about renouncing my love for Microsoft's products. I got into the tech world through them, so their stuff was all I really knew. It's like a non-dev growing up using Mac and iPhone. You don't really know what other hardware and software can do (especially since Microsoft is now acting a LOT like Apple nowadays). Ever since they killed Windows Phone, I started seeing past the rose-colored glasses. They've annoyed me with one slip-up after the next. The only things that have kept me tied to them are my Windows Insider membership, and their developer platform. Now that I've seen things like Fuchsia and Linux, I realize that the way Microsoft is going about technology is painful to developers and consumers alike, and this is now beginning to hurt their bottom line. I'm sick of it.

The issue is that if I leave the Microsoft platform, I will have no time to waste. I spent the last 2 yeas cozying up to them, and now I will need to find other platforms, languages, and utilities to build a portfolio from. This also means that I will despise pretty much every major tech company for different reasons (Apple for locked-down hardware, Microsoft for locked-down software, Google for it's monopolistic actions and its unfair policies and terms, Amazon for its invasiveness, etc). If things get worse, I'll probably end up going to Linux and joining the open-source community. The only worry I have is what I'll do for a career. I'm almost halfway to getting an Associates in Computer Science, but where do I go from there? Can't make a living open-source (unless I get patrons, which is unlikely), will probably abandon my dream of joining Microsoft or Google, and I don't currently specialize in any particular area of development yet. I want to spend my life dealing with tech and software. But right now, I've got next to no plans. I've got a lot of thinking to do...

Aaagh...... 2022 this year has been shity for real..
So its now 1 year and I've been a fullstack developer for this mid tech company as the only developer

so I've been trying to get these guys to hire a second developer. and try to also upgrade equipment and these guys didnt even bother to attend to my requests and during my evaluation meeting on friday these guys where down my neck about why projects are taking time to complete i MEAN WTF!!!!! told them its bcoz Im a 1 man army and most of the times Im chocked with the "any other duty" thing and how tha fuck do they expect them projects to be done on time
I'm the only developer some times i get sick 2weeks and where i left off is were i continue from and thats 2 weeks work of progress down the drain
I'm so fucking pieced off ryt now I feel like droping this shity job and find a much better organization
they want me to build them a developer department and they dont even equip me with the necessary tools to do so WTF do they think they are doing they think they know better than me?
so let them build their fucking dev department without me
this has been a fucking stressful experiance
wrote them a later to hire a second developer
I dont fucking care how they are going to do it
contracting or an internal dev if they dont in the next 3 months I fucking leaving this shit

I've just started my new career with a job in IT operations and I love it. After my electrical engineering degree I fell into a job as a website manager for a small company, I self taught html and css and I knew from then that I had found a job that didn't feel like a job. I'm​ excited to learn everything I need to know to progress as far as I can go in this industry. In my first few weeks at this new job (where i have my own office!) I've self taught python to create automation scripts for live projects, currently up to my eyeballs trying to figure out how to change the VB code for an excel module.....Then there have been so many other projects and bugs and I love it! Any tips and advice is greatly appreciated!

I see ads on marketing tools every fucking where.
Do I look stupid to you, Facebook and Google?
I don't fucking need them.
Who needs those stupid products anyway?

I even saw a reskinned XAMPP being marketed as 'local testing for your WordPress website', like what the actual fuck? Isn't that fucking scamming?
Oh, right. They were targeting WordPress monkies. Oh.

Anyway, please show me some more keyboards instead.
I've been in keyboard market for like 2 weeks you know.

Holy fuck.

Use Xamarin, they said. It will be easy, they said. You will only need to write your UI once, they said. NOPE
Documentation is shit, I've been sitting here for the past hour and a half figuring out how to add an icon to a button in their shiny XAML thing for which they have NO DOCUMENTATION. THEY WANT YOU TO HOE IT OVER C# BUT THEY ONLY GIVE EXAMPLES IN C#. And now I'm trying to figure out where I can download the iOS UIBarButton icons, because you can't use native icons and fuck apple too, they don't want to give em to you.
What a hellhole.
All while my client is constantly spamming me in all ways, distracting me, marking issues as "supercritical" (which makes an alarm ring on my phone and is only meant for emergencies) and otherwise distracting the living daylight out of asking for screens of the UI.

AND I STILL PREFER IT OVER ANDROID STUDIO. Don't even get me started on that one.

Hey. Can I borrow your ears for 5 minutes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since day 1, I've been eager in learning everything dev-related in English, and as it, I've focused on thinking, writing, shitting and eating english for a basis.

Now, where I work, I say, our country native language it's Spanish, but I feel bad whenever they tell me I must write everything in Spanish (code included). Maybe I'm overreacting or something.

So, here's my question for you, devs, when you're working on a coding-related project, should it be on English or not?

Have a question about my career:

So far my career out of uni has been like this:

8 months in first place working as C# .NET dev, creating native desktop apps for windows. job was shitty, was not getting any best practices skills so I left.

12 months in 2nd place working as android dev in a startup. was working all alone and had to rebuilt my app up to 5-6 times to learn best practices. startup didnt care about android app at all so I left and now doing just some small freelance work for them.

3 months in new startup as android dev.Today I was told that its decided to focus on iOS and do all marketing (also uplift of new design) only on iOS. basically for next 3-4 months they don't plan to do much on android side. they saw that I showed some interest in backend and now they are asking me to talk with two other senior guys about starting with some small tasks for me on backend.

Our backend is mainly using python. Also backend guys will be pretty busy for next few months because they will have to deliver many new features in next few upcoming months. I've talked with one of them and he said that this is a bad idea to force frontend to start working on backend. However I feel that he's sort of gateekeping and probably just doesn't want to help me with getting up to speed.

In my defense, my knowledge doesn't end with C# .NET desktop apps and native mobile apps for android.

I have hobbie projects (gameservers) where I worked on websites (php,html,css,javascript,mysql) and also was taking care of a java based gameserver which is hosted in a linux vps.

Also I've had a small hosting "company" where with available tools I've managed to automate VPS(virtual private server) ordering, web hosting ordering and domain ordering. Basically I owned a dedicated server and did everything using whmcs, cpanel and proxmox virtualization.

I trust myself in learning this backend stuff and doing whats required, however I learned everything by myself and I won't follow all of these best practices.

Should I accept more responsibility on backend or should I continue focusing on android?

I have so much work to get done I don't even know where to start anymore. I've got 6 sites in development, 20 sites with continuing maintenance, and I'm in charge of everything IT in my office.

Today I asked if the other developer on our team could help out and take a few maintenance clients off my hands so I could work on getting builds done.

We called a team meeting where I explained my workload and pointed out that in order to make the deadline of next week on two of these builds our other developer is going to have to help out with some of the work on my plate.

Other dev: Well I've already got 3 sites that still need maintenance this month and I'm still working on $client site.

Me: Ok well today is only the 3rd so you have all month to do the maintenance on those sites, these two have to be online next week and I still have 100 hours of work to do between the two of them.

Me to CTO: can I get some backup here? Or can we hire me a monkey (my term for interns) for a couple weeks so I can focus on building?

CTO: We'll have to talk about that at our meeting next week. In the mean time, just do what you can to get the sites done and let me know if you think we aren't going to make the deadlines.

Me: That's what this conversation is, I'm telling you now, and I've been telling you for 3 weeks that we were getting close to my limit for my workload. We have approximately 175 work hours in a month, maintenance contracts alone accounts for 120 of those hours.

CTO: Alright, well if after Monday you don't think you're going to make the deadline (Thursday), then we'll see if we can find a solution.

Fuck this shit, I get paid the same whether the client is happy or not, I get paid the same whether we reach the deadline or not. I asked that salespeople stop making deadline promises before developers get to look at the scope but that's not the way we do things here. At least one of these sites is not going to be online Thursday, probably both.

I've only been working for a about 6 months, so this is the best I got.

I'm working with a software/programming language I've never worked with before this, so sometimes I have to go ask my co-worker if what I did is correct, or ask him where some information is stored.

So sometimes I do someting, and then go ask him if it's ok and I can continue. He looks at my code, starts asking questions and (sometimes, not always) says something like "this is not it, let's do it together". Alright, I understand that, I know I still make a lot of mistakes and I'm still learning how to work with this. It's all still very new to me.

We start looking for stuff, making queries, programming, etc. and then we end up with the exact same code that I had made... But, somehow, now it's correct...

This happens so much, I hate asking him things now!

Me: Ok I've updated the docs, I'll open a PR with the changes

Maintainer: Looks great! Can you remove the changes to the package-lock.json? (I assume it got updated when you ran npm install to start the webserver)

Me: Ok sure, I'll update it soon

And this is where the troubles begin. The file was commited 2 commits ago, so I have to roll back to then. However, the remote repository has been updated since then, so I git fetch to keep up to date.

This makes the rollback a hell of a lot harder, so I run git log to see the history. I try a reset, but I went back to the wrong commit, and now a shit ton of files are out of sync.

I frantically google 'reset a git reset', and come across the reflog command. Running that fucks things up even worse, and now so much shit is out of sync that even git seems confused.

I try to fix the mess I've created, and so I git pull from my forked repo to get myself back to where I was. Git starts screaming at me about out of sync files, so I try to find a way to overwrite local changes from the origin.

And by this point, the only way to describe what the local repo looks like is a dumpster fire clusterfuck that was involved in a train wreck

I resolved the mess by just deleting the local copy and git cloning again from my fork.

I gotta learn how to use Git better

best place to ask stupid developing questions is?

For example: I've been developing in html, css, jquery, PHP for the longest time and I think it's time to learn node.js and / or react. Where should I start?

After 25 years working in the IT industry, as a web designer, developer, digital marketing professional, and a bunch of other stuff, I've had it up to here with recruiters who approach me on LinkedIn. After having (presumably) reviewed my extensive and detailed résumé and testimonials from people I've worked with that I put there for the world to see, they then are surprised when I tell them in no uncertain terms and before anything else is said that, yes, I'm interested and that I need $X in compensation to take the job they're offering. They just don't know what to say to that. Here's a hint: "Yeah, that sounds like something we can work with. Let's schedule an interview." or "Sorry, we're not paying that much." But say _something_.

I figure that I'm done playing the "We have a job, and we want you to jump through a million hoops to find out what we'll offer you" game.

Let's play a new game, where you pay ACTUAL attention to my experience level, and then you ask me if I'm available and I say "Yes, and here's what I want to get paid. When can we meet?" My CV speaks for itself. You either want me or you don't. No, I won't take your stupid qualification test. No, I don't want to be put in front of 5 different HR screeners. If you want me, I'll be here waiting for you to schedule a real, bona fide interview with the person who is empowered to make a decision. I've LONG not been some junior-level schmuck you can feed into your filter to figure out whether I'm worth it. Ok?

!rant

Hi! This is my first post, I've been programming for about 5 years now and know multiple languages. I intend to do a degree in Computer Science soon but I wondered if anyone had any advice about breaking into the industry, specifically video game development.

I'm not sure if this is really where I'm supposed to post this but I've seen others posting similar things so I figured I'd try it.

Thanks in advance!!

I have found that once you work for a company where you have to implement everything in its raw form using the raw language and raw logic, you really have to know what you're doing and knowing some basic/medium programming and having some algebra knowledge doesn't cut it (unlike some people think).

I've been at two sides of the coin: I worked for a company that had everything in place, a framework that handled all edge cases and what not and I just had to focus on user stories, but I also worked for a company where I had to do everything manually.

For example, at the latter company I had to know Discrete Mathematics; truth tables to their most convoluted and disgusting form, having to be able to apply this on a late Friday night with a headache and lack of food and sleep with the PM stressing out.
I've had to deal with NOT AND OR AND OR AND OR AND branches or whatever, where an OR behaves like an AND and if you want a value between an AND AND and an OR, you'd have to do a NOT OR.. to think about latches, all in my head, sigh, anyway, within limited time constraints, without even having time to write tests, having to make sure that everything checks out while the client is breathing down my neck. Yeah, not such fun times.

I'm happy for those of you who can just write some moderately difficult logic but you don't have to break your head over doing everything manually, as if you're in the coding stone age and nothing is taken care of.
Companies like these make me want to run away.

I bought a new pc and am excited about using it, but, Windows wouldn't be Windows if its installation went flawlessly. Facking Windows.

For 4 evenings I've been trying to get Windows 7 installed on it, and it just fails with the sooooo helpful error message 😑 It's missing a driver for a cd/dvd drive but of course it won't specify which, or where to get it. Moreover, I don't even have a facking cd/dvd drive!! Moronic Windows. (I'm (trying to) install via usb). For fuck sake

I tried everything Google had to offer, but to no avail. Now I am just stuck. Silently sitting there... Not coming up with solutions.

I also don't have another laptop or anything so for every idea/attempt I have to go to friends to get it. It just pisses me off. FACKING Windows

I've been browsing devRant for a while now, and it's a really warm community, so i wanted to ask a question. I want to get into C programming and don't know where to start. Could someone point out somewhere good to start?

I've been using webpack for a few months now but always using someone else's config. Today was the first project where I started from scratch with my own webpack config. Learnt a lot and it actually worked!

If anyone has read any of my posts before you may know, they're usually of a certain... Shall we say, dark, nature?

Well this possibly represents one of the darkest things I've imagined (with regards to technology and programming) I've had.

I was asked if I want to be buried or cremated when I die and they seem so... Pedestrian and I thought long and hard about what would be a fitting way to honour my life and what to do with my remains and it came to me...

I want my flesh to be only partially treated with formaldehyde so chunks of me rot away and others don't.

I want my skeletal structure to be replace with titanium rods with actuators and servo motors where my joints would have been with an internal gyroscope to assist with balance and my corpse will be installed with some sort of IOT controller board with on board wifi.

The companion smart phone app will allow my partially rotting cybernetic zombie corpse to be driven around by a bored grave yard grounds keeper while kids are doing LSD pretending they're all that.

Make them really believe the apocalypse has begun and the dead have risen.

I could be a whole thing for future corpse disposal too.

"Smart corpses, for the loved one who will be more intelligent in death than they were in life."

Although that's probably a bit too harsh...

i had an epiphany today, in a discussion with the software architect of our new project.

i'm having the epic job to design & implement a prototype for a C++ library in a new software project and collected some inspiration in our "old" software, where i'm maintaining the module that fulfills the same functionality (i thought). i've been maintaining this module for around a year now. i analyzed the different features and stuff to consider and created a partial model of the new library.

when i showed it to the architect today, he was like "oh my god, no no no, you don't need all this functionality, this shall not be part of the new library!"

this was the moment when i realized how deeply fucked up the code base of the old module is.

imagine it like this:
you want to automate the process of making yourself a good ol' cup of coffee.
the reasonable thing would be to have

- a smart water boiler where you set parameters water temperature and amount of water to be fetched from the water supply
- a smart coffee bean grinder where you can set type of beans, amount of beans and grinding fineness
- a component where water and ground coffee are joined to brew the coffee, where parameters like duration, pressure etc. are set
- a milk tank where amount of milk, desired temperature and duration / speed of foaming can be set
- a sugar dispenser where amount of applied sugar can be set
- optionally, additional modules with spices, syrup, ice cubes, whatever for your very personal coffee experience

on requesting a coffee, you would then configure and orchestrate all components to your wishes to make you a fine cup of coffee. you can also add routines like "makeCappucchino()", "makeEspresso()", or whatever.

our software is not like this.
it is like this:
- a smart water boiler consisting of submodules that know how to cook water for e.g. "cappucchino with sugar" or for "espresso without sugar, but with milk and ice cubes"
- 5 smart bean grinders that know how to grind beans for e.g. cappucchino, espresso, latte macchiato and for 73ml of water preheated to 82°C
- a very smart sugar dispenser that knows how to add sugar to 95, 98 and 100°C coffee and to coffee made of BOTH coffee arabica AND coffee robusta beans.

etc. etc., i think you're getting the gist.

when i realized this, it was like, right in front of my eyes, this terrible pattern emerged like a foul, corrupted caleidoscope of chaos, through the whole code base of this module.
i've already known how rotten from the core this code base is, but today i've actually identified a really bad pattern that i hadn't realized before. the whole architecture is so bloated that it is hard to have an overview of the whole thing. and it would require a LOT of refactoring to repair this pattern.
but i guess it would also be infinitely satisfying because i could probably reduce the code base for 30% or something...

but unfortunately, this is never going to happen, because screw refactoring.

it's a great feeling to start this new library from scratch, tho...

!dev

So last week I sort of unfriended a friend from college that i guess is more like a "chat buddy". After college we've never hung out. Part of it maybe because I'm deaf so there's a communication barrier, I lost most college "friends" after that... but then are they really friends?

The reason was though, he talks to me every night (usually 1-2 hrs online chatting on and off), we do have some laughs but recently he's been complaining about his year end bonus, how it's not enough. And also about how he deserves to match with better girls than the ones he's getting now. He's on those online dating sites and went out with a few. And he's been on a few dates but with my looks and health issues, online dating is pretty much useless. He was the only reason I even tried

He makes twice as much as me already but "he comes from a poor background" so he needs more. Honestly I make enough, but the job isn''t great (not really learning anything new, lot's of things that could be better... obviously) but it's very flexible and near where I now live... should I even choose to go into the office (I sort of work remotely from the rest of the team).

I probably haven't spoken too him for a week now and I don't feel problems, frees up more time but wondering if I sort of withdrawing/unanchored from reality and ignoring problems, settling for less.

Nowadays it really feels like, when I'm in my own apartment or just alone, I'm in my own world, I can do whatever I want... thought most of the time is spent with my devices... so I'm not sure though if that's good or not... Am I a Bachelor or a hermit?

Now i've been rambling for the last 1hr and have no idea what I wanted to say.... guess I just needed to rant...

Ah I remember now sorta... Is this relationship worth keeping or should I find new friends that are more similar to me?

Maybe I've been moving in the wrong direction in life... I shouldn't do things the normal way... Think about what's actually important to me/people like me... not what what everyone normally does...

Yet another night where my mind won't slow the fuck down, so i've just been laying in bed, perfectly awake, for the last 9.5 hours.

So since starting my new role I have had nothing to rant about. That changed today.

HR waited til one day past payroll cut off to issue my paperwork. Meaning I get paid at my old rate this month and then get back pay in my November pay slip.

Those mother cunting bastards waited one day extra to screw me for the whole month.

I've been waiting since the end of September for these twat monkeys to get off their rotting arses and sort this and they do it one day late.

It's a good job that I don't know where they are located, nothing good would be waiting for them if I did.

Edit:

As this got cut from the tags:

HR please kindly go find a rotting puss filled dick and shove it up your lazy fucking arse you pitiful wastes of human meat bags.

!rant

I always hear stories about someone hearing one of our developer friends is a developer and assumes that means they know everything about computers. Hell, I've had it happen to me before (usually the common "oh I have an app idea that's better than facebook! you just have to build it")

A big one I hear if someone asking a developer that has only worked with software to help fix a hardware issue or build a computer. Personally, I'd prefer if someone asked me about a hardware issue (except printers, fuck printers) or to build a computer for them. I've been called a rare breed for knowing about an equal amount about computer hardware and software.

I'd much rather do some physical work building a computer (as simple as a hello world program, a lot of it is putting shit where it fits) than build an entire website or program for someone. But I mean, I might actually know hardware a bit better than I know software, and that's just me. (Obviously never do anything for free when you could be paid for it)

Actually have a dev thing to say now.

I wrote a script to compile my kernel with the latest mainline version using my current config options. It works...so far. I'll check back with it in a couple months and hope it still works good. It also checks daily if my kernel is out of date (yes I'm one of those, fight me)

Also managed to get my laptop to boot from power on to LightDM in 15 seconds, and 9 of those seconds are firmware. It DOES have this thing on occasion where it freezes during the boot process while initializing everything tho?? I've been meaning to try and figure it out for a minute but I put it off so much cause I don't reboot that often anyways.

As for a personal update, I hung out with some good friends today and my best friend heard my singing voice for the first time, she said I have a good voice (she does a lot of musicals and stuff and just sings all the time, so I trust her opinion). I also gave that friend a gaming laptop as a late birthday gift/early graduation gift today because she doesn't have anything to game on and I didn't really use the laptop much anyways. Plus she's like my favorite person ever and she really deserves it. Unrelated note, I have had an off and on crush on this girl for 2 years. She's always been there for me and she's just an amazing person.

Got a high paying job, with great benefits, and a big name, straight out of college. I was hired as a software engineer. Comfy, relaxed, and flexible.

The problem comes where it was not the job I was expecting. It has been almost a year and the only programming I've done has been 1 small copy pasta project. I am worried because I am bored and feeling my coding skills fade away. I'm still a novice programmer and feel like this impacts future career opportunities not learning useful skills for outside of this company. I'm going to grad school to do what I really want but still have the 2 years.

Do I stay or do I make the stressful change again? Other fun thing is I just relocated a distance to an area with not a lot of opportunities so would likely involve relocating again.

I've been creating a new website layout for a small theatre group. I am like how it's coming together :)

It is designed with user interaction in mind because the layout they are using now is... Well, thrown together. It uses images as buttons and I had a few friends of mine ask "Where do I get tickets" and it is not updated regularly.

I plan to automate a few things like for shows, if the show date has passed, it will remove itself from the home page. I also plan to web scrape, if the site permits, some information to be displayed on the show page.

I got to lots to do before I can show them what I've made.

A big part of my frustration as a programmer is that I don't have a lot of friends that are on a similar level that are willing to let me bounce ideas off of them. The last few years I've been flying blind with no external frame of reference except for the few really beginner dev friends that I have.

Where do you people socialize? IRC has long been... well, kinda dead compared to how it was 15 years ago or before. I have ideas that I'd love to discuss with others in the same sphere of interests but simply cannot find them.

Frustrating.

I live in Asia, where Pinkerton Syndrome is rampant amongst the professional workforce.

I've been approached by local recruiters who love tossing the company's country of origin (usually a developed nation from the European continent) in the first sentence of an email, and beseech me to call them back ASAP, or lose the opportunity of a lifetime.

I also get condescending emails from Caucasian 'CEO/Director' (no offence meant, I know the entire demographic is never represented by sub-samples) looking to pay below average rates.

Is getting difficult to be civil with these morons.

Windows 10 insider preview had a critical bug like half a year ago where most browsers would freeze the PC. I've reported it multiple times but my feedback didnt get any attention. The bug made it to production months later...

Now, the story is repeating. I've discovered a bug. Everytime there's a software update for apps that with a built-in updater in the main .exe (JetBrains IDEs, VS etc.) the updater fails, program is corrupted and needs to be reinstalled. For instance, there's a minor bump in Android Studio version, if you try to use autoupdater it will corrupt your Android Studio and you'll have to reinstall.

Been trying to reach out to them but the only "real issues" that are highlighted are "no CPU temp in task manager" or "pls improve automatic problem resolving"

Why the fuck do you even have a feedback program if you're ignoring the people who are reaching out to you, you pieces of shit

Sometimes I really feel humiliated in my lab.

We have several presentation/discussion groups in my lab that meet once a week or so where members present their progress reports. Generally people in my lab are not so enthusiastic about them. Which is okay, I also don't like doing presentations, but you know, you have to improve somehow and get feedback somehow.

So I've been in a really passive group for a while and I decide to join this other group since they seem to have good discussions, but nope fuck me.

The first time I present, the professor doesn't show up since he has some meeting, so obviously nobody cares to show up. And I'm there presenting for a guy who is half comatose. Alright, I guess that's the price for joining a new team, it's gonna get better next time.

Second time. Spent all night to prepare my presentation and been training my model for two weeks. I am actually really happy with the results of my networks. But the enjoyment of showing some good results, I shall not have.

Meeting leader doesn't show up. Two guys who should present don't show up. Professor doesn't show up. A different professor substitutes him and has no idea what I am talking about and asks stupid questions that don't really have an answer. Fuck me, I'm so angry, this shit is a waste of time. If you don't show up, care to fucking send an email or a message on slack, but guess you're too fucking retarded to even do that.

I'm so done with this. I've gotten better feedback from reddit, than what I've cumulatively gotten from my laboratory. I'm a moment away from walking up to the meeting leader and telling him that the meetings are stupid and a waste of time. Don't get me wrong, my professor is really nice and knowledgeable, but he fails to see that some people in the laboratory are shit.

What do I do? How do I deal with these people? Right now they're planning a trip! Why are you planning a trip? WHAT ARE YOU REWARDING YOURSELVES FOR? YOU HAVE DONE NOTHING IN WEEKS? omfg

I've always wanted to do something in IT Support, but I didn't know where to start. I've been helping my co-workers optimize their system and even helped retrieve photos from a tablet that had a broken screen; her service plan said along the lines of "if they weren't there they were lost," I was able to retrieve them in a matter of hours (Really guys! I'm shocked! It was just a broken touchscreen, the storage was just fine. I think I'll remember this moment).

And because my growing impopularity, I started a new business called The Webnician. The company is split into two sections, the Technician, and the Web Developer. Hence, The Web(Tech)nician. I am proud of my name choice.

Then I wanted to become a certified technician, so I did some research on how to become one and found out I need to take the CompTIA A+ 220-901 and 220-902 exam and... I couldn't be more excited!

I've always loved computers, and maybe my late father had some say into it. Nevertheless, I am excited to begin my journey, even though it took awhile to find where I needed to go. I hope you all can follow me on my journey and support my new business.

I don't have anything else to say, so I'll just leave here.