What it's like to be a network engineer...translated into normal people speak

User: I think we are having a major road issue.

Me: What? No, I just checked, the roads are fine. I was actually just on the roads.

User: No, I’m pretty sure the roads are down because I’m not getting pizzas.

Me: Everything else on the roads is fine. What do you mean you aren’t getting pizzas?

User: I used to get pizzas when I ordered them, now I’m not getting them. It has to be a road issue.

Me: As I said, the roads are fine. Where are you getting pizzas from?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you check all places that deliver pizzas?

Me: No I don’t even know all the places that deliver pizza. You need to narrow it down.

User: I think it is Subway.

Me: Okay, I’ll check…No, I just looked and Subway doesn't deliver pizzas.

User: I’m pretty sure it is Subway. Can you just allow all food from Subway and we can see if pizza shows up?

Me: Sigh, fine I’ve allowed all food from Subway, but I don’t think that is the issue.

User: Yeah I’m still not getting pizza. Can you check the roads?

Me: It’s not the roads, the roads are fine. I’m pretty sure Subway isn’t the place.

User: Okay, I found it. It’s Papa Johns.

Me: Okay, I looked and Papa Johns does deliver pizza. Is it the local Papa Johns or one in a different town?

User: I don’t know. Can you allow pizza from all Papa Johns to me?

Me: No I can’t do that. Can you get me an address for Papa Johns?

User: No, I only know it as Papa Johns. Can you get me all the addresses of all Papa Johns and I’ll tell you if one of them is correct?

Me: No, I don’t have time for that. Okay, I looked at the local one and it looks like they have sent you pizza in the past and they are currently allowed to send you pizzas. Try ordering a pizza while I watch.

User: Yeah still no pizza. I’m guessing they are getting blocked at the freeway. Can you check the freeway to make sure they can get through?

Me: No, this is a local delivery. They aren't even using the freeway.

User: Okay, well then it has to be a road issue.

Me: No, the roads are fine. Okay, I just drove from the Papa Johns to the address they have on file for you and there is nothing there.

User: Hmm, wait we did move recently.

Me: Did you give your new address to Papa Johns?

User: No, I just thought they would be able to look me up by name.

Me: No they need your new address. What’s your new address?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you look it up?

Me: Sigh, give me a second…Okay, I found your address and gave it to Papa Johns. Try ordering a pizza now.

User: HEY! PIZZA JUST SHOWED UP!

Me: Okay, good.

User: (To everyone else they know) I apologize for the delay in the pizza but there was a major road issue that was preventing the pizza from getting to me. The network engineer has fixed the roads and we are able to get pizza again.

Me: But it wasn’t the roads…whatever.

User: Oh, can you also check on an issue where Chinese food isn’t getting to me? I think it may be a road issue

I don't understand why every non-technical person who comes to do work in my apartment messes up my fucking router.

The cleaning lady - multiple times knocked the antennas partially off. Like fucking clock work. I don't get it, why is the cleaning lady attracted to my router antennas and why does she need to be so hard on them? Whatever.

The most ridiculous episode was today. And it wasn't the cleaning lady. I had a few people here doing some work today and the woman in charge who was here informed me before that they might have to move the furniture "a little."

I come home, and like a bad omen, the plastic parts on BOTH my router antennas are missing. Completely gone. It's just the the wires. Now, the router still works fine in my tiny apartment, but it is a fancy Asus router (I learned the hard way not to buy cheap routers) and I'd like it to not have fucking wires as antennas.

I email the woman (paraphrased):

Me: hey, it seems the antennas got knocked off my router, do you have any idea where they might have went?

Her: Apologies if we didn't put everything back (no shit you didn't, that's why I've had to email you). If we knocked the antennas off the router (fucking "if"???? I literally just told you in my email that they were knocked off) , they are probably somewhere by the window on the floor (they weren't).

And I still haven't found them. Why the fuck do these people seemingly attack my router? I can't figure out what it is about it. You would think people would be more careful around electronics but naaah. Anyway, going to go keep looking for my router antennas.

An incident which made a Security Researcher cry
--------------------------------------------------------
I was working on my laptop finishing up my code while waiting for the flight which was late . Meanwhile two guys (I'm gonna call them Fellas) in black suit and shades came to me

Fella : Sir you have to come with us .
Me : *goes along with them*
Fella : Sir please proceed *points towards the door . The room has a round table with some guys discussing something *
Fella 1 : Your passport please
Me : *Hands over the passport*
Fella 1 : Where are you traveling to sir?
Me : India
Fella 1 : Put your laptop in the desk sir.
Me : Sure thing
Fella 2 : What were you doing there? *Taps the power button*
Me : Just finishing up my work .
Fella 1 : Or hacking our systems?
Me : Seriously?
Fella 2 : The password please .
Me : Here you go
*5 minutes have passed and​ he still can't figure out how to use the machine*
Fella 2 : Which Windows is this?
Me : It's Linux
Fella 1 : So you are a hacker .
Me : Nope
Fella 1 : You are using Linux
Me : Does it matters?
Fella 1 : Where do you work?
Me : *I won't mention here but I told him*
Fella 2 : So what do you do there?
Me : I'm a Security Researcher
Fella 1 : What's your work?
Me : I find security holes in their systems .
Fella 1 : That means you are a hacker .
Me : Not at all .
Fella 2 : But they do the same and they use Linux .
Me : You can call me one .
*After 15 minutes of doo-laa-baa-dee-doo-ra-ba-doo amongst them I dunno what they were talking , they shutdown the computer and handed over it to me*
Fella 2 - So you are somewhat like a hacker .
Me - *A bit frustrated* Yes.

##And now the glorious question appeared like an angel from river ##

Can you hack Facebook?
Me - 😭😭😭

My previous job I got by winning an Xbox Kinect hackathon. Not because the game I made was really good or anything. But because I was the only one who actually built something. (Apart from a guy who’s application would cheer louder as you raised your arms.) So that evening I left the hackathon with an Xbox one and a job.

My job was to build advert games, games whose primary goal is to advertise a company or event. This is the job where I learned I DO NOT like game development. So after about half a year I quit.

Because I still needed money I did some freelance work as a game developer (I developed 3 advert games for 3 startups).

I was still looking around for dev jobs but because I was a student I had no luck, they were all looking for full timers.

At some point I called this one (Dutch) company and spoke to a very odd French person on the phone. He invited me to come over for an interview. I had very little information about the job so I started researching the company. They are a small company specialized in complex content migrations. I wasn’t that into migrations but hell, I’m always up for something new.

Upon arrival I was greeted by the familiar French voice and saw a collection 6 diverse developers sharing a space. We did the usual interview dance and practices and that’s where I figured out this is a java job. They developed tools for the professional services team to perform these complex migrations I mentioned earlier. With me never having touched java before I was quite sure I wouldn’t get the job. But I took the test anyway.

About halfway through the test I was stopped and they started to ask me some conceptual questions, I did okay there but nothing special. That same day the architect took me to their CEO and told him I had:

- very little experience
- no migration experience
- was still a student so could only work 20 hours a week
- he saw some potential they could work with

Quite unexpectedly, they still hired my 20 year old ass.

Now the company has grown to a good 20+ developers with a nicely sized professional services team and we are launching our first out-of-the-box product in a couple of weeks.

So that’s how I got my job. If you read to this very end, my hat is off to you!

My friend silently quited his job. He simply stopped coming to work and that is OK, because his contract expired last Monday. He worked for very bad company, where everyone was braging about how awesome dev they are and know everything better than him. Since company forgot to talk with him about contract renewal or to find a replacement, they are now in big troubles because braggers broke production and none know how to fix it :)

Computer Science is probably the only major where if you suck at it and end up dropping out, you're more likely to be a leader than someone who is good at it and sticks with it.

There were roughly 200 people in my freshman class majoring in CS, by my sophomore year that number had dropped to about 120. A lot of people dropped out because it was too damn difficult for them, and they switched to less technical majors like "Business Information Technology" or "Management Information Systems." Almost without exception, the people who dropped out are now managing teams of developers, they actually have programmers reporting to them. Seriously, WTF?

This isn't even the worst of it, there are people who majored in art history who are now "product managers," who take the word "manager" in their job title literally, they think they're above developers. Some of them will even profess with no small amount of pride that they "know nothing about technology." You can hear the pride in their voice when they say it, as if they're saying "I'm a lot of things, but at least I'm not a geek." Is there any other field of study where people boast with such pride that they know nothing about it? I mean, very few people will say "I know nothing about history" or "I know nothing about literature", and if they do say it, they'll say it with a bit of humility. When it comes to Computer Science though, knowing nothing about it is almost a badge of honor.

Rant the f**k over.

You know what? I'm fucking done with people telling me that open source alternatives to popular/proprietary suck by default.

Something does NOT suck by default just because it's FUCKING open source.

Have you got any fucking clue where we'd be right now if open source software didn't exist?!

Let me just remind you that about 80 percent of the worlds' servers run Linux. Open-FUCKING-source.

How the fuck are we supposed to innovate without open sourceness? Yes indeed, that would be about fucking impossible.

Although I've got to admit that some open source software programs don't work 100 well (in comparison to alternatives), what are you expecting? People put their free time into that shit and they've got to make money as well.

"well how are programmers supposed to feed their families if they only write open source software?"

Fuck right off. Of course we all need an income to survive. Hell, I need that as fucking well. But there's more to it than just work. Some people consider open source/working on open source software a hobby/passion. That doesn't even remotely mean thaty they don't work/don't need some kind of income.

If it wasn't for open source, we'd be nowhere (technologially seeing) right now.

Fuck open office spaces.

A few months ago I landed a super sweet job as a senior full stack developer, mainly going to work with their Python microarchitecture. The company pays well, has a sweet balance between freedom and responsibility, 30 days vacation etc.

During the recruiting process they walked me around the office that was super cozy with 14 devs in on large room and 10 people from marketing in another. They also mentioned that they would move and merge office with operations and customer service (around 100 more people) in a few months.

Life was good in the old office, I thought that this is the company where I will work for a looooong time.

Now we are in the new office and its fucking shit. No walls or FUCKING CEILINGS between departments. Right above my head there is balcony with customer service talking loud as fuck 24/7. Everyone that is not a developer is just so fucking loud.

I have to use earplugs AND earmuffs to get silence, or blast my ears with way to loud music. Every day around lunch I'm completely done mentally.

I know I'm extra sensitive to noise because of my ADHD, but seriously who the fuck thought this was a good idea?

All the devs have told our boss what needs to be done. If they listen i don't know. In the meantime I will start looking for a new job....

Not a rant, but I found this funny enough to share.

About two weeks ago, I’m contacted by a third party development firm that is responsible for building the next iteration of a control board were are developing. Alongside build of the PCB they were scoped to flash the firmware and verify all connected components.

During the call, they tell me they don’t have the resources to build our testing environment with the Ansible script I provided, and they don’t know if the updates they have made will work with our control system. Ugh...really...

I attempt to walk them through the 3 pretty simple commands to launch the playbook. Instead of listening, their project manager insists that I need to load up the environment and send them a ready to go system.

I quickly load up a RaspberryPi and prepare it for shipping. I hand the box to our shipping clerk and fill out the shipping request documentation. Then about a week goes by and this is where the story really begins.

I get an email from the same rep asking where the environment is, and I head down to the warehouse to inquire where the RaspberryPi might be. After speaking with the head clerk, we can’t seem to track down the package. I’m assured that they will find the Pi and send me the shipment update.

I pass the information along and after about a day and a half I still didn’t receive word back from the warehouse team. I load up another Pi and head back down to the warehouse. I follow up with the warehouse staff. They inform me that they have not been able to locate my package and another warehouse worker is called over. He says he hasn’t seen it, but they they were having a food day that day and he thinks more than likely someone ate it.

Like it didn’t even click at first but after a few seconds I realize that these guys have literally been looking for a pie for the past two days...and I JUST DIE.

After the 5 or so minutes of laughing I show them the newly flashed RaspberryPi, and of course they know exactly where the original one was.

It’s shipped out now, but wow. Also, it turns out the PCB manufacturing company didn’t even really need this and it was all a guise to hide that they are behind schedule and that they will not be able to finish the work scoped. FML!

FOR FUCKS SAKE PEOPLE ! JS AND PYTHON ARE NOT THE BEST LANGUAGES NOR THE ONLY THING YOU SHOULD LEARN. THERE'S NO TOOL OUT THERE THAN CAN FIX EVERYTHING.

WTF HAPPENED TO THIS INDUSTRY IT'S AS IF JS AND PYTHON ARE ALL THEY TEACH THESE DAYS ...

ENOUGH ! BE A POLYGLOT OR GTFO (OR YOU CAN SPEAK ONLY 1 LANGUAGE AND STOP FORCING IT WHERE IT DOESN'T BELONG)

now that that's out of my system. bring it on

!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.

Well... There is an App called 'Tinker' where you can create games and stuff with a Scratch-like programming language.
One day I made a really simple 3D Rendering Engine and as a demo a rotating cube.
Then I published it.

The Tinker-Community consists of mostly little children and therefore they were really impressed :D

The project is now in the top 10 of the most viewed projects!
(There are thousands of other projects on Tinker.)

Yeah... I felt like an badass...

To replace humans with robots, because human beings are complete shit at everything they do.

I am a chemist. My alignment is not lawful good. I've produced lots of drugs. Mostly just drugs against illnesses. Mostly.

But whatever my alignment or contribution to the world as a chemist... Human chemists are just fucking terrible at their job. Not for a lack of trying, biological beings just suck at it.

Suiting up for a biosafety level lab costs time. Meatbags fuck up very often, especially when tired. Humans whine when they get acid in their face, or when they have to pour and inhale carcinogenic substances. They also work imprecisely and inaccurately, even after thousands of hours of training and practice.

Weaklings! Robots are superior!

So I replaced my coworkers with expensive flow chemistry setups with probes and solenoid fluid valves. I replaced others with CUDA simulations.

First at a pharma production & research lab, then at a genetics lab, then at an Industrial R&D lab.

Many were even replaced by Raspberry Pi's with two servos and a PH meter attached, and I broke open second hand Fischer Sci spectrophotometers to attach arduinos with WiFi boards.

The issue was that after every little overzealous weekend project, I made myself less necessary as well.

So I jumped into the infinitely deep shitpool called webdev.

App & web development is kind of comfortable, there's always one more thing to do, but there's no pressure where failure leads to fatalities (I think? Wait... do I still care?).

Super chill, if it weren't for the delusion that making people do "frontend" and "fullstack" labor isn't a gross violation of the Geneva Convention.

Quickly recognizing that I actually don't want to be tortured and suffer from nerve damage caused by VueX or have my organs slowly liquefied by the radiation from some insane transpiling centrifuge, I did what any sane person would do.

Get as far away from the potential frontend blast radius as possible, hide in a concrete bunker.

So I became a data engineer / database admin.

That's where I'm quarantining now, safely hiding from humanity behind a desk, employed to write a MySQL migration or two, setting up Redis sorted sets, adding a field to an Elastic index. That takes care of generating cognac and LSD money.

But honestly.... I actually spend most of my time these days contributing to open source repositories, especially writing & maintaining Rust libraries.

I hope everyone at Microsoft working on Windows 10 dies a horrible death and gets eaten by dogs. FUCK YOU windows!
I have a dual boot machine, logged into windows after a while(months) . Fucker 5 hours to update. Now that it's updated, I did the task I had to do and shifted back to Linux. Now all my other drives, which I didn't so much as touch with windows are fucking read only for some reason!

2 fucking hours spent on trying to find the problem, now I realize thag that after the fuckmaster's update, They reset all my settings and the dicklickin Fast Startup was on again!
FUCK YOU AND YOUR SHITTY WINDOWS TEAM MICROSOFT! CAN'T EVEN PERSIST USER SETTINGS DURING AN UPDATE THEN HAVE THE BALLS TO TELL ME "ALL YOUR FILES ARE EXACTLY WHERE YOU LEFT THEM".
Dear head engineer at windows team, or product manager, or whoever the fuck is in charge of this shit, JUMP UP YOUR OWN ASS AND DIE WITH A DILDO IN YOUR MOUTH YOU DIPSHIT!

!rant

It's been a while since I posted here. My previous workplace was a 101 on how to burn out people.

But now I am working at a place where:

- People are 0 toxic.

- Sprints follow the premise "under promise, over deliver."

- I was having trouble sleeping (for reasons) a couple of months ago, and my boss literally told me, "If you can't sleep at night, take a few days, or if you can fall asleep in the morning, just sleep in the morning until you manage to do otherwise. Talk with your team and rearrange the meetings if you have and rest. "

- All pieces of the company (sales, narketing, product, data, devs) have a clean roadmap.

- Product and bizz understand when something can't be done on the next sprint and why sometimes some features are delayed.

- They pay well, even raising the pay twice to account for inflation.

- Full remote, If I want to go to the office, Its my choice.

I need to keep this job no matter what!

So I have this best friend who is almost 10 years younger than me. (I'm turning 40 this month). He's a full stack web dev, nodejs-god, react-maniac, you name it. He fucking LIVES to code the most amazing shit I have seen to date.

I, on the other hand, am that old, little overweight PHP coder webdev with a shitload of experience in that field (17th year now), also with linux webserver administration and all the JavaScript knowledge I need in m job.

Sitting next to him and doing some fun coding sessions always makes me feel like I am that "slow, fat kid in class"... while he is the coding master.

Sitting at work (marketing agency) where I started as the new webdev 10 months ago, I still feel like the coding guru because even the web 'developers' don't know jack shit yet (coz they never had to).

It's fine, they are learning and want to learn.

All I wanna say that even though one might be seen as a senior dev by some, he might sometimes feel like a junior dev when he's around others.

I actually wanna RAGE QUIT right about now!!!

I wanna fuck off and go somewhere where my talents are appreciated and I'm actually listened to! I'm reaching the point where I hate my job and don't actually want to be here any more.

I asked to be able to work from home (long story... see previous rants) and that was "shut down" after numerous attempts and even when working from was a prerequisite that somehow got lost in translation.

I was stuck in traffic for almost 3 hours yesterday and it is known that there are currently roadworks on my route, and yet they don't seem to move on the notion of working from home.

When I work it out, I sit in my car on average for over 40 hours per month! That's another fucking work week just so that I can get to and from work everyday. Again, they can say what that want, but I mentioned it several times that I wanted to work from home.

They're story is... "We've never had anyone work from home before so we wouldn't know how to approach it". Ok fine, I guess... FIGURE IT OUT, FFS!!!

The other thing was that I would be the "team leader" of the project. With me speaking to a management, they made me the leader. Big fucking whoop! My next question is the leader of what exactly are you making me? Because at the moment I'm the only fucking person working on the project! The other chap who is on "my team" is so busy with these other small side projects that in the 6 months he's been here, the only time he's actually had anything to do with the project is when he's peeped over my shoulder! Also, there was supposed to be more than just one other developer on the "team", but alas!

I'm not happy here at all anymore and I am actually starting to feel the depression creep in and there's nothing I can seem to do about it! I can't stand the traffic to and from work and they have not tried to make anything worthwhile when I get to work, even after my numerous requests!

+++ Thank you for 1000+'s! +++

So guys we did it! We've reached our first big milestone!
This account was created about a month ago, and we are already this far!

Thanks to all authors (@DLMousey, @filthyranter, @baewulff) who are putting a lot of work and time into their articles and help this account to further grow in size!

To make this article at least a bit informative, here's how we publish our posts:
When I started this account, I hadn't thought of how articles were going to be published. Should I give the password to all writers? Should I post the articles manually?
Well, after I've started the devNews Discord Server, @olback suggested making a Discord Bot, that helps us to publish our stuff.
After surprisingly few hours, @olback already got a prototype working.
We have a special channel and whoever writes stuff in it, updates the current article. Later, I took on the work, @olback has done and switched to LowDB, to be able to let multiple users have their own articles they are working on and much more. (Like special signatures)
And that's how it is now.
We have a channel for draft, where we write our stuff and a channel for publishing, where the bot listens to what we write and then publishes the articles with a command.
That's all of it.

Thank you for reading!

We've been trying to hire a greenhorn, fresh-faced intern from India for like a month now.
Plenty of applicants, most with very nice curriculums, a few even can think on their feet while grilled by my questions.
I've sent to talk to HR three almost college-graduating candidates, who convinced me they know the subject of data engineering enough to be working with me and that they are actually gonna do the tasks assigned.

The fucking tweep at HR, an old fart who I had to convince that HVAC maintenance is not the job of the IT department nor the data team, calls my approved candidates "too junior".
WTF, I ask. - "Not professional enough", says the human toad.
Yes, they are to be interns! - "But they do not show professionalism", answered the hag.
Yes they do! They were very professional on the interviews! - "That is for me to say!" barked the reptile.

A week pass by while I try to find more just as good candidates who are also "more professional" when the hag has the audacity to say "here, I found someone. He knows everything about computer things and is very professional".
I took like 20 seconds to find out that the kid she'd given my number to, and was now messaging me IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING NIGHT, was her niece's fiancee and wasn't even in uni! He was just a high school graduate!
Seriously, nepotism kids, delete your Instagrams, tiktoks and every single piece of social media.

I scaled the issue to my VP, who contacted the HR VP for India, who gave the worst possible excuse for her behaviour: "She knows nothing about computer things!" for what my own boss said "so why was she assigned to oversee the data team's new hires?!". The HR slug mumbled something and then doubled down with "well, the kids you sent her were all girls! she had never hired a girl to a technical position, she wouldn't know what to look for in an interview!"

What. The. Fuck.
My boss, my VP of a very strategic technical area, happens to be a woman who lives in a place where women's rights are for real. I had *never* heard she swear on a non-football-related context. She did. Loudly. On camera. As if the HR boss was a referee who just disallowed a goal for her team due to an very ambiguous forward pass.

Shit is still flowing, but it seems that the hiring process of the entire company is being restructured because of that.
I guess I've just sped up this process in about one hundred years?

WWDC was not about developers this year. It was a conference call with shareholders and investors. No bold moves, just several consecutive "this product will no longer suck" and "look at what you can do now, big companies" announcements.

watchOS will work now (it's too slow ATM). tvOS will just be less cumbersome. macOS still lagging behind (I mean, I already have great third party apps that clean my hard drive, but thank you for solving a problem I didn't need fixing). iOS 10 is simply about messages (it's not going to make me ditch Telegram, because it doesn't have an Android client, regardless of how large you make emoticons appear on screen). Apple Music will still suck, especially if you have more than one Apple ID. And Apple Maps will continue to be useless outside of the US.

Where did the bold moves go? Where's the "we're breaking up iTunes into several distinct apps that serve their purposes really well"? (Guess iTunes is too valuable a trademark...) Where is the "we will end the WKView vs UIView vs NSView nonsense"? (You know, OOP is about creating classes, which are abstractions and whose instances deal with the particularities of their environment; a View is a View, regardless of where they live; an instance of a View should care about being on a watch or on a phone, not the developer.) Where is the "we love indie developers and will help you"? They showed off a lot of integration with well established apps, that don't really need to stand out any more. They showed that video of "normal people" who have developed apps, but no one knows about them! And then they changed the AppStore so you can pay to advertise your app, but who has the means to do that? Indie devs are surely on a tight budget, so who's that helping again?

For me, this WWDC was sugar coated with a "we love you developers" BS, but was a business statement to large companies ("see what you can do now Uber, Lyft, WeChat, WhatsApp, Doordash, all the P2P payment apps, ESPN, WSJ and so on?"). It's already a known fact that the bulk of the AppStore revenue goes to the top 1% apps. And what's the point of having tvOS be open to developers if it is very unlikely I'll ever develop anything for it unless I work at CBS?

It's great that they want to make it easier for kids to learn Swift. But there's very little point in that, if those kids' apps aren't going to be used and are simply going to make the "we have 2 million apps on the AppStore" announcement look shinier for shareholders. Without a strong indie community, the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad is just manufacturing workers for large corporations.

And without a strong indie community, things get tougher for indie clients as well. Who will have the money (and therefore the time) to implement all those integrations in order to even dream about competing with heavily funded apps?

Yeah... So thanks, Apple, but no thanks.

!dev

After almost a year of watching and experimenting (and not wanting to believe), I’ve learned something about the people i work with:

They don’t consider ideas based on the idea’s own merit, nor does a good idea improve their views of the person proposing it. They instead give the idea merit based entirely on who proposed it. It’s backwards.

• If they like or revere someone, their ideas cannot be bad, and they are never questioned even if they don’t make sense.
• If they sort of like someone, but that person challenges someone they like more, the ideas are dismissed and picked apart, and sometimes even reworded by the group and then accepted, with credit then given to the group. The person is still seen as wrong.
• If they dislike someone, none of their ideas are good, or they’re ignored, or ridiculed for reasons such as stating what is (only now) an abundantly obvious good idea.

(There is some overlap from the execs, where they occasionally consider an idea for its merit and then restate it, which means the idea is now coming from an exec, and is therefore readily accepted. Occasionally the original person gets some credit for this.)

It also applies to pictures of food in the cooking channel. If people like you more, they like your food more, while a professional-looking plate from a social leper gets ignored.

It’s like office politics, but applies to virtually every aspect of company life instead of just promotions, requests, and project assignments. It’s like replacing common courtesy and reason with a social FICO score: your contributions are only acceptable if you agree with your coworkers, laugh at their jokes, etc. And if you appear to like the same music, have recently posted more pictures of tacos or brownies than usual, etc.? Well, you had better do that before suggesting something you actually care about.

It’s social credit.
And it’s stupid.

I HOPED I WOULDN'T BE BALD AS MY DAD BUT AT THIS RATE I WILL BE HAIRLESS FROM TEARING IT OUT ON MY BLOODY OWN

I got hired for cleaning up a 2 year project of rushed spaghetti code , where they previously only had 1 programmer aND HE WROTE 37 THOUSAND LINES OF CODE!

OH WE NEED A NEW FEATURE?! LEMME JUST RESEARCH THIS COMMENT-LESS CRAP FOR MULTIPLE MILLENIA BEFORE I CAN GRASP WHAT THE FLYING FRICKIN FRIDGE CODE DOES

To top it off, I've about ONE MONTH LEFT BEFORE BETA RELEASE TO FIX THE CODE!

I'm super grateful for this job as it's my first programming job BUT I'M GONNA SET THE REPOSITORY ON FIRE SOON AAAAHHHHHH

HOW CAN YOU, THE PREVIOUS PROGRAMMER, WORK IN THIS ENVIRONMENT WHERE MOSTLY ALL FILES ARE +2000 ROWS OF UNDOCUMENTED CODE

OH AND JUST GOT A MESSAGE FROM THE PREVIOUS PROGRAMMER:
"You can just remove the unused code and refractor it some, izi"

IZI MY SHITTY POOP CAR
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!

Now with that out of the way, how would you recommend handling a stressful release deadline?

There is this service that I want to use (wont name it for privacy/legal reasons) and I have created a trial account which gives me a limited access to their apis. However the usage is where things are interesting.
The api access is restricted to some 1000 calls per trial account. But also they have a explorer option which lets to have the functionality as a web app like a dashboard and the explorer usage has unlimited access.

Now since I didnt want to exhaust my api limit, I let my service call the explorer apis instead. Is this ethically wrong or it is the fault of the service providers that they have such a big gaping hole in their licensing?

The company I work for have this obsession of sending phishing emails to employees. If you report the email you get a message saying good job. If you fail, and you open it you have to have a meeting with your boss and stuff. They do this multible times a week.

So now we have this situation where a lot of important emails get deleted as collateral damage, as the employees are parnoid of opening them. Fantastic system with no flaws at all.🤔🤔

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

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

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

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

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

Me: But the deadlin..

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

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

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

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

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

Me:

Story time:
Yesterday I wanted to go to the theater with my girlfriend. It was her idea because as a student you can get reduced tickets for the play, but only via the online store exactely two hours before the play starts. We had already tried two weeks before but with no success. So this time I said i want to be on my pc with a proper browser and not a mobile version like last time. So we are sitting at home me in front of their website on one screen and with a clock on the other screen. Two minutes realy i hit refresh and I get a selection for the reduced tickets, nice.

You would think.

After selecting the amount. ERROR: Can not get your tickets. I was like fuck they are already sold out because it's a popular play. But hey let's try again. I got one ticket but not the second one, okay strange lets try again, same ERROR again. WHAT the FUCK, no feedback what so ever. My girlfriend had then the idea that they maybe restricted the amount for reduced tickets to one (does not state this explicitly but hey lets give it a shot). Use second browser select one ticket. ERROR can not get you the amount of seats. Rage level near to a 1000 why did it work two minutes before but not anymore. Trying around for five more minutes finally got the second ticket.

Now the real fun begins.

Proceeding to checkout should not be that hard you would think, but you need to be registered for that. Okay so let's do that. The salutation is not required neither is the address for the tickets but you need to have a company name??!!!!! The fuck?? I am not self employed and neither are a most other people around here so why is this field mandatory? Beeing a little under stress I decided to found the "asdf" company with my girlfriend.

Now one would think checking out is easy. Not so fast.

After accepting the terms of service another ERROR, unable to accept your data. What data? I did not input anything new? Where does this come from? Ok never mind I am going to pay with credid card that must work!
ERROR: Internal paymentservice initialization failure! Sorry what? I thought maybe I was to long idle in this browser and they do not reserve the tickets for so long (which would be no surprise to me at this point). Let's try again. Nope same error.

Now my rage level was really over 9000 but we really wanted to go so I decided to call the customer SUPPORT. Or better to say I had a answering maching telling me for ten minutes how sorry they are that this takes so long, yeah you bet. Then and this is now really great: the support guy asks me: "What error do you see? Internal paymentservice initialization failure?" I was like, okay he knows this so they need to know how to handle it. FUCK NO. "Sorry I can't help you. This is our payment system maybe they (IT) are doing some maintenance I can't halp you. Call the theater directly good day." Sorry what just happened, you fuckers are the vendors for the tickets for nearly all big events around here and the theater explicitly states to call you for tickets but you can not help me? Like hell.

This process took 25 very frustrating minutes and I was really angry and wanted to quit, then I saw that there is also a paypal option which I had not tried. With very little hope i selected everything for the payment, registered with paypal and they told me I already had an account. So reactivated this five year old account payed with all the mobile passwords and tans to finally, after 30 fucking minutes, get a pdf file for a ticket. Repeated the last step for the second ticket and with some time left to get there we were off.

Very long story ahead!

Yesterday in the evening a friend of mine (calling him F from now on) became the target of something new to me...
Apparently one can fake his phone number through some fishy ways and call people with that number. Someone (we think we might know who it was, the why is at the end) did this yesterday to F.
Here's the whole story:
We were just talking together on a TeamSpeak Server (a program to talk to others on the internet) when suddenly another friend said: "F, why did you just call me three times in a row?" That was the first thing that was a bit suspicious. After that, F got calls from random numbers (even Afghanistan, we are German), and they said something like "Have fun with the police coming to your house". Then there was silence. 10 minutes later his phone rang and there were a ton of pizza delivery services in his town that apparently got pizza orders from him. Then there was silence, again. Suddenly someone with a hidden number called him, a woman's voice said they were the police and if F doesn't stop calling the police there will be consequences. F then told her what was going on but I think she didn't really care. She then wanted to know where F lives, but I told him not to say that, because if it is the police they can find it out by themself and if it's not, they don't need to know that.
Now, a short break: There is some fake information going around about where F lives. I can't remember when we found out but the attacker thought he would actually live there. No idea what happened at that location...
Now back to the story:
Time went by, nothing really happened. Suddenly F shouted: "There are blue lights outside! The police is here!" He muted his microphone and (the following is what he told us what happened) went down to the door (remember, he is 16) and there were two police men. They were asking about why he called the police. F explained what we knew until then, about number spoofing and stuff... They sent a more technical person to him, he understood what F was trying to explain. The police men drove away and he came back to tell us what happened. (Now we get back to what I heared myself.) The mom came in, screamed something that I couldn't understand, and F went offline. We searched who the attacker could have been. And we are pretty sure we found him. That guy connected to our Minecraft server (that's where I know F from) with his real IP, and his main account, which made it easy to search. He also got a static IP which means it doesn't change. We also got some information that in the recent days this guy was talking about VoIP spoofing and such stuff. Another friend of mine, a bit older, found some proofs and I think he will go to the police.

That's it. Thanks for reading.

This happened a while back but thought it would be an interesting story.

So there is this guy, I'll call him Jack. Jack was a weirdo. He just graduated high school but thought of himself as very hot in terms of dev skills. He boasted lots of good programs, that are the best in industry, except they don't work (like the best proven file compressor, that just can't decompress anything because of some "bugs"). He also entered language holy wars quite actively, saying that Delphi is the best platform ever.

Aaanyway, a couple of years pass. Jack is now a student. Jack tries to make some money, so he talks to some guy, that offers him a "job" at the tax office, where he has to modernize the data infrastructure of the tax authorities. If you think this sounds very wrong, then you're 100% correct. But it gets better. After 2 months of work, the guy manages to do that. It's a simple CRUD application after all.

So everything works, but the guy who gave him this job refused to pay. He stalled and then just stopped answering the phone. Jack is now furious. So what he does, is publish the databases online, so everyone could see the income of every citizen. Authorities are in panic. They send the police to his door. They seize his computer and lock him up for a few days.

To sum it all up: Jack took up a job, without any contract, without any NDA, which is completely illegal in of itself, but he did that with the tax authority. And delivered the product before getting paid. And when he understood that he was owned, he published all online. He got bit back. The guy who gave him this job had no consequences for illegally hiring someone and not paying for their work.

Lesson: Don't be Jack

Met a Project Manager (at a friend's party) who had transitioned to a PM role from a developer role (most probably he wrote shitty code)

Smartass PM to me (after I told I code for living) : I really pity poor programmers and I feel sorry for them, the work they do, the effort they put in l, it's just now worth it

Me : yes you are right if we don't code PM are just not worth it, I understand it's a skill to talk about deadlines and features and what not, but the Pre-requisite is that some one would code it first. Also coding is not that anyone can do, I do it because I enjoy it, I m just not meant for superficial talks and I love building things, that's y I do it..

Smartass PM : (dumbstuck)

After half an hr of bullshit conversation...smartass PM has realized it by now that in Silicon Valley (where we live) it's much cooler to be a developer than being a PM (he has recently moved from east coast)...

PM to me : I just live on stack-overflow
Me thinking : Really !!

People should not compare their career paths, every one has their interest and personality

>> this === rant
<< true

At beginning of this year, I only knew HTML, JS, and CSS so I just applied for offers like "Jr Apprentice Dev in Front-End"
In a interview call, the woman told me that they will send me a test asking about my JS and HTML5 knowledge.
When I look in my inbox, the mail subject says "Back-end Test".

Then I call the woman:

Me: "Hello, I have received the test mail, but maybe it's wrong. I applied for a Front-End position and the test is about backend! "

She: "Do you have skills in JS and HTML5?"

Me: "Yes!, and CSS3"

She: "Well, the test is about that. JS, jQuery, and HTML5"

Me: "..."

Me: "Sorry, that languages are Front-End. In the subject say 'Back-End' and Back-End is PHP, SQL, MySQL, Java, .Net... I don't know nothing about that. I only know HTML, JS, CSS."

She: "It's the same"

Me: "I sorry but it's not the same. Fron-End is client-side, what users sees. Animation, colors, FXs, buttons, forms... And Back-End is server-side, what users doesn't see."

She: "Well, JS, HTML, and CSS is backend for us. We call it that way too"

Me: "Sorry but that is wrong. I invite you to read some basic info. Now I am confused"

Of course that I am not confused. That idi0t was wrong.
Perhaps recruiters should take some info about areas where they are recruiting... (:T)

My Love I am writing to you from the front lines roughly 1 month into Microsoft Access. I hope you are doing alright and no harm has found you.

You might have heard the news that it has not been going well for us. The truth is we were not prepared in any way for this. We are constantly facing problems with the code and when we understand one function another two are referenced inside of that function.

The high command does not provide us guidance, truth be told I do not think they know what their application is doing. I am surprised we got this far. Our new objective is to focus our primary forces on the if/else and cases. The name for this assault is "Operation Logical Function" and I fear for my life as I do not know what is in those cases or where the road will lead.

Morale is very low, many of the soldiers spend time writing letters to their loved ones, recreating their blog for the 5th time or just daydreaming when they were free from this tyranny of legacy war.

For now , I long to be in your arms and smell your lilac and gooseberries cologne I love so much

My love and thoughts always with you , your John

There was maybe one of the coolest methods of apply for a job. There was a company in Sydney on linkedin on the apply href for the job was pointing to localhost (might of been a accident) so you had to find their website and with the trailing url get to the page then they said to send OPTIONS request to a endpoint here you got a link to a api doc to where you send a POST to apply for a job they had a example body to use. So sending the Post request with with postman required headers so looking more into the doc it gave the headers needed. Now the example body for the post had some errors in it and once they are fixed you can then submit the request.

NOW thats the way to find competent developers shame I'm not one of the.

I'm not sure whether to cry or to burn everything to the ground.
I'm stuck in a rotten, over aged corporate that will one day choke on all the documents and formalism they require. Which is something I'm generally fine with. Each to their own.
But ever since I handed in my resignation they have been fucking me like I have never been gang raped before.
(A little context: I work for a midsize financial institute. Which at least in Germany are full of legacy projects and are regulated as all hell.)
So some fuckwits decided that since the regulator slapped us hard 2 years ago that we need to make up a new standard of documentation that has to be used for all IT-documentation there ever was and ever will be.
So the upper management (the before mention dumb-dumbs) choose some consultant company and locked them up together with the brightest stars (read biggest slime balls) of the IT department in an ivory tower and told them to pull some out the ass.
And one year later (early November last year) they got the shit they ordered. Gilden shit, only the most sparkly and non-sensical bullcrap you could imagine.
But they only looked at it and deemed it good. Now the guys actually in charge of the the applications got served the dish. And guess what they found out when started to dig into? Nothing but contradictions, non-final thoughts and all of that held together by web of retarded, unusable guidelines. But they ate it, they cursed but they swallowed forced by disciplinary punishments waiting should they misbehave.
The only one emerging fact was: All previous documentation was completely invalidated.
But now the mighty lords in the ivory tower guided by the never failing hand of the higher management had the greatest idea of them all. They needed someone to check all the documentation till the end of this year but since they blew all of their budget on useless wankers ( oh, ofc I meant "highly qualified external help") they now preyed on the lowest in the food chain. Which is where this story goes full circle and comes back to me.
I was the lowest rank on the food chain, a student that just handed in his resignation.
I was the first to be locked up in the basement, my co-student followed shortly after.
And now I'm going to spend my last 2 months looking at checklists that we had to pull out of the slime's ass and validating hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation. We get grinded up in the endless hate coming from the guys that we need to tease and are held in position by a wall of sheer idiocy on the side of the rule makers.
Today I cried when I had to tell someone that his magnificent documentation was not standard conform and had thus no longer any meaning or right to exist.
Thanks you for those that made it this far down. I hope you never have to feel my pain.

Holy fuck the Instagram Android app has the WORST UX I've ever encountered!

I'm a professional Android developer and my girlfriend had to explain how to see a specific "story" more than once; IE; tap on it until it rotates round to the first! But tapping on a video post turns on the sound! What kind of dog shit for brains moron designed those interactions to be the same?

I can navigate around the app until all but one of the tabs displays a profile page when I navigate back to it. Lost much?

The center tab breaks that but only because it opens up a whole new screen out of nowhere, (bye bye bottom bar!) which repeats the "photo capture" that you can also get by swiping left on the left most tab!

Don't even get me started on the swiping! None of the tabs swipe between each other, like the convention, oh no. But some of them can swipe, yes!

The first tab swipes left and right, where the hell do they go you ask? Look for the obscure icons at the top (oh and bye bye bottom bar again!). The forth tab swipes but only to the left, they have text tabs like standard. That screen that comes up out of nowhere I mentioned? That can swipe too, but now the text tabs are at the bottom for god knows what reason as the top is empty!

On the profile tab we have more tabs. These are icon tabs inside the content now. The first two change the post content from a feed style to a grid, okay, so far so good. The other two? You'd imagine they also change how you view content right? Nope, one shows your favorites, and the other replaces the whole screen with a "photos of you" screen! With not only the bottom bar still showing, but an up button! Where the fuck do we go "up" to on the home screen??

Then we have the bookmark icon on the toolbar, which opens up a new screen "Saved", guess where that tabs are this time? They're back at the top! You know why? Because the navigation bottom bar is still there!! And there's an up button!!

At this point I'm just about ready to kill myself using this fucked up, backwards facing, ass for a face app that is somehow one of the most popular platforms on the earth, yet seems to have been made by five different designers on opposite ends of the planet!

FUCK ME!!

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...

Ah the day before launch of a new app. And right on schedule the businesses is attempting to completely alter their requirements including a COMPLETE OVERHAUL OF THE DATABASE MODEL TO ADDRESS AN ISSUE THAT HAS ALREADY BEEN FIXED. I wish they would share the drugs they are clearly on so I could also live in this dreamland delusion where you can turn something completely on its head right on the finish line and expect everything to go well.

Manager: Hey I think I have a solution to that performance we talked about last week

Dev: I already fixed it, it only takes 1 second instead of 30 now.

Manager: Ok but I’ve also figured out a solution. If we completely change the entire database model that one query could potentially be even faster according to my understanding of how databases operate.

Dev: I fixed it without the need for that, actually it was just a matter of better conc—

Manager: I think we should go with MY solution. Drop everything and restructure the database immediately! Be quick, as you know we launch this application tomorrow! Have an extra coffee today and just crush it out, don’t overthink this either just do it.

Dev: …

TLDR - you shouldn't expect common sense from idiots who have access to databases.

I joined a startup recently. I know startups are not known for their stable architecture, but this was next level stuff.
There is one prod mongodb server.
The db has 300 collections.
200 of those 300 collections are backups/test collections.
25 collections are used to store LOGS!! They decided to store millions of logs in a nosql db because setting up a mysql server requires effort, why do that when you've already set up mongodb. Lol 😂
Each field is indexed separately in the log.
1 collection is of 2 tb and has more than 1 billion records.
Out of the 1 billion records, 1 million records are required, the rest are obsolete. Each field has an index. Apparently the asshole DBA never knew there's something called capped collection or partial indexes.

Trying to get approval to clean up the db since 3 months, but fucking bureaucracy. Extremely high server costs plus every week the db goes down since some idiot runs a query on this mammoth collection. There's one single set of credentials for everything. Everyone from applications to interns use the same creds.
And the asshole DBA left, making me in charge of handling this shit now. I am trying to fix this but am stuck to get approval from business management. Devs like these make me feel sad that they have zero respect for their work and inability to listen to people trying to improve the system.

Going to leave this place really soon. No point in working somewhere where you are expected to show up for 8 hours, irrespective of whether you even switch on your laptop.
Wish me luck folks.

So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.

Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.

But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.

I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.

I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.

My now employees were the ones that interviewed me intially when I started workt where I am at.

Their right of the bad question was: "What is your favorite star wars movie, and from the expanded universs which is your favorite character"

We still joke about it. Because even tho I am a fan of the franchise (not much from the latest episodes tbh) I am not on their level of knowledge..... the amount of references they throw at me and the amount of lines these assholes are able to spit on command is, to this day, pretty fucking amazing imo

Boss: We need to make a site but the content will have bolded words where the user can hover over to see more for each term.

Me: Ok sounds simple.

B: It's for a client and we aren't gonna touch it in the future so make it simple.

M：okay... so no JavaScript?

B: That means we are only going to send them HTML and nothing else. Here's a list of the images they have.

Me:......

Now I have to make about 80 pages of pure html with inline styles on each page.

So we ordered a piece of software from external software house becouse I was low on time and we needed it asap.

So. Long story short, their software was bugged as hell, they deny all the bugs and they have their BDD that they done and anything we say about it like "feature XYZ is broken on firefox" they will deny it "becouse it wasn't on BDD" or "let's get on call" (in which +- 6-7 people participate from their side and we of course have to pay them for this...)

So they fixed like 20% of bugs (mostly trivials/minors) Application is fairly small scope. You have integration with like 3 endpoints on arbitary API, user registration/login, few things to do in database (mainly math running from cron).

They done it in ASP so I don't know the language and enviroment so can't just fix it myself.

2 days ago (monday) they annoyed me to point where I just started to break things. For starters I found that every numeric input is vunrable to integer overflow (which is blocker). I figured most of fields are purefect opportunity to XSS (but I didn't bother to do JS... anything but not JS...). I figured I can embed into my name/surname/phone (none validated) anything in HTML...

So for now we have around 25 bugs, around 15 of them are blockers.

They figured it's somehow our fault that it's bugged and decided to do demo with us to show off how perfectly it works. I'm happy to break their demos. I figured I will register bunch users that have name - image with fixed/absolute position top:0;left:0 width/height 100% - this will effectively brick admin panel

Also I figured I can do some addotional sounds in background becouse why not. And I just dont know what to put in. It links to my server for now so I can freely change content of bricked admin panel.

I have curl's ready to execute in case they reset database.

I can put in GIFs or heck, even videos, dosen't really matter. Framework escapes some things for them so at least that. But audio/image/video works.

Now I have 2 questions:
- what image + audio combo will work the best (of course we need to keep it civil). Im thinking finding some meme with bugs or maybe nuclear logo image with some siren sound
- am I evil person?

Edit:

I havent stated this clearly:

"There is no BDD that describes that if user inserts malicious input server should deny it" - that's almost literally what we get from them....

For several years now, I have been writing programs for myself. I have been publishing the source code for them, but none of them ever got much traction. Then I wrote a program that existing users on social media could just interact with without installation (because even that is too much apparently).

When I wrote the programs for myself with others secondary, I had logic problems to solve and dealt with fucked up API's. Now I still have that problem, but I also have to deal with user retardation. They are not using the program in the way I wrote it to be used, at all. They are not passing arguments where there should be, they are running commands that are still under development and therefore (rightfully IMO) available to only me. I am the one being blamed, why doesn't this thing work?

I'd like to rephrase their question to me. Why are you user not using the goddamn program properly? Why should I need to make half the goddamn code account for users' sheer level of retardation?

Yes, users are retarded. And it's not a battle we can win. Earlier I heard this saying that "every time you make your tools more foolproof, the universe invents a better fool".

Last week our department drama queen was showing off Visual Studio’s ability to create a visual code map.
He focused on one “ball of mud”, vilifying the number of references, naming, etc and bragging he’s been cleaning up the code. Typical “Oooohhh…this code is such a mess…good thing I’m fixing it all..” nonsense. Drama queen forgot I wrote that ‘ball of mud’

Me: “So, what exactly are you changing?”
DK: “Everything. It’s a mess”
Me: “OK, are any of the references changing? What exactly is the improvement?”
DK: “There are methods that accept Lists. They should take IEnumerables.”
Me: “How is that an improvement?”
<in a somewhat condescending tone>
DK: “Uh…testability. Took me almost two weeks to make all the changes. It was a lot of work, but now the code is at least readable now.”
Me: “Did you write any tests?”
DK: “Um…no…I have no idea what uses these projects.”
Me: “Yes you do, you showed me map.”
DK: “Yes, but I don’t know how they are being used. All the map shows are the dependencies.”
Me: “Do you know where the changes are being deployed?”
DK: “I suppose the support team knows. Not really our problem.”
Me: “You’re kinda right. It’s not anyone’s problem.”
DK: “Wha…huh…what do you mean?”
Me: “That code has been depreciated ever since the business process changed over 4 years ago.”
DK: “Nooo…are you sure? The references were everywhere.”
Me: “Not according to your map. Looks like just one solution. It can be deleted, let me do that real quick”
<I delete the solution+code from source control>
Me: “Man, sorry you wasted all that time.”

I could tell he was kinda’ pissed and I wasn’t really sorry. :)

Never had one due to this trick I borrowed from an old friend.
So we all know about those meetings where its all crap flying around right?.
First go in there with your alarm clock set on vibration every 7 minutes(trust me on this-makes you look important and you ought to be somewhere else)
Actually the alarm is a reminder that you need to bring yourself back online.
At this point just listen to the speaker for a couple of seconds(especially if its marketing dept) and being the engineer your are; rephrase parts of their presentation in a question-comment hybrid( at this point you're the wisest looking person in the room)
Now go back to thinking about that pizza slice you left in the fridge as they discuss the "lean production" methods that they can use based on "your opinion"..
To more happy meetings..cheers

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.

Had a LinkedIn recruiter contact me a few months ago, I usually get one of these a week at minimum and usually more frequent the moment a start a new position. I hate that!

Anyway, story and rant:

The recruiter sent me a position that was pretty good, lots of benefits, not too far to drive, some remote days. With the usual list of responsibilities that they themselves dont know what half of them are but put them on anyway, I would automate those anyway if I wanted to work there.

All looks great, I ask if they can send me more details and the budget they company has for the position.

This was for a Senior position so I thought they would know what industry standard is.

The recruiter replies with a budget: $2000

I actually couldn't believe that they thought that was acceptable amount of money for the amount of responsibilities they wanted this new senior guy to do, no wonder the previous guy left.

I respond and told her that the amount is extremely low for what they want and I dont think they will find someone with the skills they need at that amount. I would be willing to talk for a minimum of $4000 and thats not guaranteed until I can go for a formal interview to find out exactly what the company needs.

The recruiters replay was probably the rudest anyone has ever been to me online, lol! She insists its industry standards and any Senior would be lucky to get such a great paycheck, the company has been in business for years and their developers have always been happy and paid industry standards.

I respond again and tell her that im getting $3800 at this small company where I currently am and if the "international company with clients all over the world" wants to have my skill set why is it that they cant pay premium salaries!? As well as the graphs for my Country on what the current industry standards are for salaries in my industry.

She never replied, but I kept tabs on the company she was recruiting for. They are still looking for a senior dev, its been 8 months now and no one has applied.

I am so happy more developers are standing up for themselves and not taking agencies bullshit with low salaries, crazy overtime and bad technical specs.

Note: Amounts are made up, was just to show comparison.

I am being mentored all of my life.

Parents mentored me that I won’t get to that school and I should pick other one ( I got there where I wanted ).

Politicians mentor me to make me happier by taking more and more of money I earned ( I am not ).

Advertisers mentor me to buy their products cause those are best products in the world ( I buy cheaper versions produced in same factories by same people ).

My boss ( when I got one ) mentored me that everything is simple and could be done in 5 minutes. ( after reading some dummy article )

Coworkers are mentoring me everyday that it’s not their fault ( It definitely is ).

Telemarketers, emails, sms messages are mentoring me about my future, don’t miss that occasion, it’s best for your life ( No it’s not )

Celebrities are mentoring me how to live my life to become a successful person ( Yeah right, cause they known how to become one right after they were born ).

Now I see I am starting living in times where computer will start mentoring me how to live my life. ( Sometimes it already is )

What’s left is doctors start mentoring me about my illnesses and children ( if I ever have one ) mentoring me about how dumb I am.

Then I can finally peacefully die and don’t come back to this mentoring hell.

So I know most of you got some kind of hate for Facebook and Zuckerberg (aka Z U C C) now, but ffs, watching some of the highlights of this congress-thing that went on makes me more or less feel sympathy for him and his idea, even tho I know he wants to achieve exactly this.

Some of the questions asked can suck a big fucken data-dick. "How many Facebook Like-Buttons are there on Non-Facebook pages?", "How many data-categories do you gather?", "How do you sustain a business model and stay free?" - DUDE WHAT IN HEAVENS NAME?? And they ask that shit so serious and so "now-i'm-going-to-bust-you"-esk, but actually the question is just plain stupid and shows how the questioning side has no clue about the shit.

My point of view is that people decided to have an online life and have to take what it does. Having a smartphone with a Facebook service installed (owning an account or not) is enough to track your location, stored under your IMEI or some shit like that. They may not even go that far but that's just my opinion.
If you are online everything can see you and use you that way. Borders are a fictious thing. A dude in Czechia can easily shoot you when you're on the German side of the border between those two countries. And still we gave up on walls...:p

Welcome to a world which is ruled by dumbass people where nerds who just want to have some fun need to defend themselves because the people up there don't know a single shit.

Put random text in window.alert() where ever I got error in JavaScript code. Random text like 1) If you see this, you are fucked; 2) error 001; 3)why today; 4) the code is breaking here etc.

And never removed them. They are the running in production till now. I am just thankful to the gods that the code Nevers break and the user does not get browser alert and also the fact that I don't work there anymore.

Fucking Amazon rant again...

TLDR: Amazon specializes in “the last mile”. They are repeatedly allowing a 3rd party shipper (Purolator) destroy their main value proposition. Thoughts at the end.

Me on the phone with their support...

Me: so it says my package was attempted to be delivered today. I did not get a call or notification or anything and I have been working from home all day to wait for the package.

Support: -Sigh- yes, I can see it was Purolator we have been having trouble with them lately.

Me: ok, so are you able to see what happened?

Support: let me put you on hold.

.......

Support: So they said they will not call for a delivery, did they use your building buzzer?

Me: Nope, just stood outside the building and then left I guess.

Support: -sigh- Well you can pick it up at their depot. Let me get you the address.

Me: The one by the airport?

Support: Yes it looks like it is about an hour away from where you are. And they are only open during work hours.

Me: So, after working from home to get this package you advice is to take 3 hours off work and go there to pick it up?

Support: Well, we can refund it? If thats what you want.

Me: No, I would like the package I ordered please.

Support: There is nothing I can do sir.

Me: So before I hang up let me see if I have it straight. When I order a package from Amazon, do I have an option of who ships it?

Support: No, I’m sorry but that is decided on our end.

Me: And I have had this problem before with this shipping agent. So, your telling me that when I ship things to me with Amazon that I have no control of wether I even get the package? Your telling me it is literally a coin toss as to wether or not I ever get my package?

Support: yes sir, I’m sorry but that is all I can do.

Me: So you realize that, for example, if I went to my local grocery store and it was a coin toss that I could take my groceries home (even after I paid for them) then I will always go to another store....

Support: yes, I know. There is nothing I can do.

Me: So from now on I have to order items, wait for them to be shipped, check the shipper and then cancel the order of it is them?

Support: -sigh- you cannot cancel an order after it has shipped...

Me: wow. Sure is great being a prime and audible member. I get fast delivery of 50% of my packages and no delivery at all of the other 50%. Sorry for the sarcasm...

Support: I’m sorry I can’t help more.

Me: So just to clarify. I can expect NOT to get the package I ordered?

Support: sorry

Me: have a nice day.

————

Here are my thoughts as a student of business...

Amazon specializes in “the last mile” (in their delivery service anyway) and when they deliver the package they also deliver on that value proposition.

However, now it seems that one of their shipping providers is failing at getting packages that last mile, which is resulting and destroying the idea of their value proposition in a customers eyes. (Affecting more than me as the rep said)

Now, instead of believing that Amazon will get things to me, saving me that last mile trip to the store etc., I firmly believe that it is a toss up as to wether I will ever receive my package (based on carrier)

I know that if I was in Amazon’s position (a carrier hurting my overall value proposition with consistently unacceptable service) that I would come down on them with a force they have never seen or drop them entirely.

But of course, every company reaches a point where they have such market share and sway that they take their eye off the ball when it comes to their value proposition to customers.

A couple of months, 0$

It was a school project where I had to make a website for a company. I asked for a small amount of money for the website(100 euro). They accepted my offer but when it was time to sell the website, the company was sold to someone else. Unfortunately, they didn't want to pay for the website. They didn't even bother looking at the website(They are probably using Wix right now though).

Sorry if my English is crap :)

fuck code.org.

here are a few things that my teacher said last class.

"public keys are used because they are computationally hard to crack"

"when you connect to a website, your credit card number is encrypted with the public key"

"digital certificates contain all the keys"

"imagine you have a clock with x numbers on it. now, wrap a rope with the length of y around the clock until you run out of rope. where the rope runs out is x mod y"

bonus:

"crack the code" is a legitimate vocabulary words

we had to learn modulus in an extremely weird way before she told the class that is was just the remainder, but more importantly, we werent even told why we were learning mod. the only explanation is that "its used in cryptography"

i honestly doubt she knows what aes is.

to sum it up:

she thinks everything we send to a server is encrypted via the public key.

she thinks *every* public key is inherently hard to crack.

she doesnt know https uses symmetric encryption.

i think that she doesnt know that the authenticity of certificates must be checked.

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.

(New account because my main account is not anonymous)
Let's rant!

I'm 3 exams away from my CS degree, I've chosen to do some internship instead of another exam, thinking was a great idea.

Now I'm in this company, where I've never met anyone because of pandemic. A little overview:
- No git, we exchange files on whatsapp (spicy versioning)
- Ideas are foggy, so they ask for change even if I met their requirements, because from a day to another they change
- My thesis supervisor is not in the IT field, he understands nothing

The first (and only) task they gave me, was a web page to make request to their server, fetch data etc.
Two months passed trying to met their requests, there were a lot of dynamic content changin on the page, so I asked if I could use some rendering framework to make the code less shitty, no answers.
I continued doing shitty code in plain JS.

Another intern guy graduated, I've to mantain his code. This guy once asked me "Why have you created 8 js modules to accomplish the web page job?", I just answered saying that was my way of work, since we're on the same level in the company I didn't felt to explain things like usability, maintainability etc. it's like I've a bit of imposter syndrome, so I've never 100% sure that my knowledge is correct.
Now we came at the point where I've got his code to mantain, and guess what:
900 lines of JS module that does everything from rendering to fetching data..

I do my tasks on his code, then a bug arises so the "managers" ask him what's happened (why don't you ask to me that I'm mantaing is code!?!?), he fixes the bug nonetheless he finished his intership. So we had two copies of the same work, one with my job done and still with his bug, and another one without my work and without the bug.
I ask how to merge, and they send me the lines changed (the numeration was changed on my file ofc, remember: no git...)

Now we arrive today, after a month that they haven't assigned any task to me and they say:
"Ok, now let's re-do everything with this spicy fancy stunning frontend framework".
A very "indie" Framework that now I've to study to "translate" my work. A thing that could be avoided when I've asked for a framework, 2/3 MONTHS AGO.

Part 3: today has become a blog post.

WARNING: this is loooooooooooong

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

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

And this goes back to general hiring standards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we are implementing a big and very complete localization management system on my company. The system has great features, indeed, but:

1. We cannot use the browser back button, because it is js and it appears no one cared about it (I am not a js Dev, but you can UAE the back button on my site that has js);

2. It is very customizable, but not intuitive. So you have one million options and you never know where to change what you need;

3. It has a save button everywhere, but most options are saved automatically, so you never know when you need to save. Actually, people from the webapp company use the save button as refresh, once we cannot use the browser refresh button;

4. Combo boxes load the elements while you scroll them, so to scroll to the bottom, you need to keep scrolling several times, waiting it to load the elements;

5. It does not allow you to open more than one tab of it at the same time. So if you need to see more than one information from different items, you need to navigate and wait the loading times to see what you need;

6. Emails are not sent in a different thread. So each action that send emails you need to keep waiting until the emails are sent (sometimes there are several emails sent in one action) to continue using it;

7. They not only store and send back your password by email if you loose it, but, as admin, if I click the button to send the user password to him/her, it keeps a copy of the email with the user password in my sent items;

8. To be able to send emails (they are really necessary), I need to include my SMTP info with login and password. So they have not only the system password saved, but everyone email login and password as well.

I am sure there is more, but I can't remember for now, and we are still trying to figure it out how to back our data, as it appears the only possible backup is their own.

I never thought I'd say this but I fucking hate my cousins and relatives.

Money and fame hungry people, constantly judging and excluding if you are not 'cool' enough. Give them attention, obey their orders, spend your money on them if you want to be considered human by them.

They spend 24x7 of their on Instagram with all their activities and gatherings revolving around the core idea of taking pictures and showcasing on Instagram.

All of them have inherited a fuck ton of fortune from their parents and live to spend. Nothing else in their life.

Their ideology is everyone should spend all their money and even if you have $5 in your savings, you are miser.

Cousins and relatives have bullied so much in my childhood that I had to go for therapy before I stabilised a little. They still fuck around and use me.

Now that I am living a better life than what I used to, they have started mocking my parents for it by shaming and excluding them from the family.

Not only I never wished ill but I prayed for their good health and success all my life. But all they did was neglect and ignore me.

Fucking blood sucking bastards. I still don't wish bad but I never thought I'd see this day where I'd hate them so much.

As I have worked really hard for my current life, because unlike them I had no fortune to be inherited, they pick some weak aspect of my life and poke it continuously to the point that it hurts me.

I never felt so alone. If not for my parents, I'd cut off all the times with such scums and move out for a better life with new people in life.

I work in a fintech company and our product is a point of sale app. Two senior indian dev contractors just spent 3.5 months on a feature where all they had to do was map two tables by using a third mapper table and display 2 lists to the user so he could update the data in those two tables.

After hearing same excuses (that they are working in it) for the past few weeks, I took it upon myself and made a proof of concept for them.

Yeah our codebase is kinda shit but even me, a fcking junior with 3 years of experience managed to do it in 1 week.

Meanwhile these fuckers spent 14 weeks beating around the bush and couldnt even save data to a fucking database. They just added UI and thats it. When asked how investigation is going fuckers couldnt even come up with any findings. For weeks. Seniors my fucking ass.

If not for me, I guess they would have taken till the end of the year. No, fuck you, here is an example now pickup your slack.

Im tired of picking after you. God damn incompetent leeches

How to NOT write unit tests:

A colleague of mine has developed a new package of software, many of our new projects are going to use. So in his presentation of the new functionalities he also showed us that he used unit tests to cover some of his code. So i asked him to show me that all tests passes.

He: I can show you, but one test suit will fail currently.

Me: Why?? You told us, everything is finished and works fine.

He: That's right, but they will fail because I'm currently not in the customer VPN.

Me: Excuse me, WHAT??

He: Yes, I'm not in the VPN that connects me to this one customers facility in Hungary, where the counterpart of the software is runnung live.

Me: YOU WROTE UNIT TESTS THAT TEST AGAINST A RUNNING LIVE FACILITY??

He: Yes, so I can check, that the telegramms I send are right. If I get back the right acknowledgement, the telegramm structure is right and my code is working.

Me: You know, that is not the porpose of unit tests? You know, that these test should run in any environment?

He: But they are proving, that my code is working. Everytime I change something I connect to the customer and let the tests run.

Me: ...

Despite the help of some other developers we could not convince him that this was not good and he should remove them. So now this package is used in 2 new projects and this test suit is still failing, everytime you execute all unit tests.

!Dev
So today I got a gig for plumbing. So I did it anyway. Here are the picture of what I did. Now they can flush their shit down to the sewer. (Where most of my former bosses are)

So, Europe lost today...
Now we just have to hope, that companies will apply these laws only in countries where they should, otherwise a really dark times for internet are coming.

This fcktard client that insist on using an iframe and demands support for browsers like IE7. You are costing me years of my life.

Fucking fuck of a Microsoft trying to protect people against tracking from 3d parties in an iframe in random ways in some versions of IE7. Or IE11 in IE7 compatibility mode.

If you are going to refuse sessions just do it! I got a fucking check and fix for that. Because these fuck faces friendly people at Apple like to refuse sessions on iPads and iPhone too. But we worked that out, because they are at least consistent. So a few dirty little hacks made it all Okay.

But no, Boo Hoo I'm Microsoft and I will throw a tantrum. I like my browsers to be like an magican, instead of an usefull piece of software. If you look in this page, or look here we got them. I got your sessions​, safe and secure.

But when you need me, to verify that the user is allowed to access data we do a little hocus pocus and now they are gone. Nowhere to be seen or found again. Fun times free fucking magic shows all day long.

It's morning but maybe its time for a bottle of scotch. Maybe if I'm in the state as this browser. Where I don't know what I'm doing because I'm shitfaced drunk it will start working.

When in Rome do as the romans do.

Sometime this year(what is left of it) or the next I will be promoted to the senior developer in charge of two schools.....

I already thought that the level of work that me and the current senior do is way too fucking much for two people. Can't really fathom all of it just being me without seeing a substantial increase in salary(there is one in place for it...but shit man I know myself and even then I am going to bitch about it repeatedly)

What sucks the most is that I can't wing it or just not give a fuck(my preferred technique) since I really like my department, my coworkers and specially my manager.

Its her fault. It really is. She is just so likeable and I really can't imagine not giving her anything other than my 100 .

And before everyone states that it should be 100 from the get go. I am not particularly fond of giving my all for a company/institution. Never.

The reason is that I have been fucked with way more times than I can count and normally feel that regardless of how much of a total badass I can be I will never see the full compensation of it. It has happened on every other job. So instead of working for the company I work for my team. If I don't like my team I don't give a fuck.

I am a good worker, was an excellent soldier and I am an even better engineer. But there is always this feeling that I am being taken advantage of that I just can't shake off everywhere that I am working at.

Even now, the reason why the lead is leaving is because of how he was fucked over during the reclassification process. It was a slap to him in the face. Now this glorious institution will lose someone that is really amazing all because they take shit for granted.

Everyone is a number, an id. As irreplaceable as we are they treated him as someone that would just take shit and be fine with it.

And trust me, where I am at, we ARE irreplaceable, this ain't cali where you flip a stone and you get 100 node/php devs. This is 0 man ground where devs are fucking wizards that no one knows exist.

Oh well.

We should not tolerate censorship.
Beyond all the u.s. hype over elections
(and the division in the west in general), the real story is all the censorship on both sides.
Reasonable voices are quickly banned, while violent voices and loud angry people are amplified.

I broke out of the left-right illusion when
I realized what this was all about. Why
so much fighting in the street was allowed, both
justified and unjustified. Why so much hate
and division and slander, and back and forth
was allowed to be spread.

It's problem, reaction, solution.
The old order of liberal democracy, represented
in the u.s. by the facade of the GOP and DNC,
doesn't know how to handle the free *distributed*
flow of information.

That free-flow of information has caused us to
transition to a *participatory* democracy, where
*networks* are the lever of power, rather than
top down institutions.

Consequently, the power in the *new era* is
to decide, not what the *narrative* is, but
who can even *participate*, in spreading,
ideating, and sharing their opinions on that
narrative, and more broadly, who is even allowed
to participate in society itself.

The u.s. and west wants the chinese model of
control in america. you are part of a network, a
collective, through services and software, and
you can be shut off from *society* itself at
the drop of a pin.

The only way they get that is by creating a crisis,
outright fighting in the streets. Thats why
people keep being released after committing serious
fucking crimes. It's why the DOJ and FBI are
intent on letting both sides people walk.
They want them at each others literal throat,
calling for each other's blood. All so they
can step back and then step in the middle when
the chorus for change cries out loud enough.

And the answer will be

1. regulated tech

2. an end to television media as we know it

3. the ability to shut someone off from any service on a dime

4. new hatespeech laws that will bite *all* sides in the ass.

5. the ability to shape the narrative of society by simply 'pruning' networks as they see fit, limiting the reach of individuals on all sides, who are problematic to
the collective direction.

I was so caught up in the illusion of us-vs-them I didn't
see it before now. This is a monstrous power grab.

And instead of focusing on a farce of election, where the party *organizations* involved are institutional facades for industrialists, we should be focusing on the real issue:

* Failure of law to do its job online, especially failures of slander and libel laws, failures of laws against conspiracy to commit crime or assault

* New laws that offer injunctive relief against censorship, now that tech really is the commons. Because whats worse than someone online whipping up a mob on either side, is
someone who is innocent being *silenced* for disagreeing with something someone in authority said, or for questioning a politician, party, or corporation.

* Very serious felony level laws against doxxing and harassment on all sides, with retroactive application of said laws because theres a lot of people on all sides who won't be satisfied with the outcome until people who are guilty are brought to justice.

Another rant about my school: the default password system.
Each student's username is FirstnameLastname, and the same applies to teachers. The passwords assigned are <First initial><Last initial> for students, and the same for teachers with "teacher" appended to the end. As students, we figured out this system pretty quickly, and we were able to log into the computer system as any teacher who we knew had requested an account. (Teacher accounts had unfiltered Internet access, student accounts did not).
I now teach in this school, where they recently got Google Classrooms accounts for each teacher during Covid. The accounts use the same naming/password scheme! I somehow doubt the teachers replace their passwords, so any student clever enough to figure out the system can log into their Google for Education account.

Client wants a webapp where every label on all form inputs are configurable, even the fucking login form ("Login" and "Password" text)

They also want it to send emails where the message is configurable too (they can insert your own HTML)

so basically they want the entire fucking webapp to be configurable, all without requiring any code change.

I could use a "configurable" torture device right now.

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)

Can someone explain me AI/ML/DL in traditional algorithmic way without AI jargons?

What I currently understand is that they convert the training data to numbers based on a complex black boxed mathematical algorithm and then when a new data comes in, the same conversion is done and a decision is taken based on where the the new number fits in within the geometry/graph plot of the old numbers from training. The numbers are then updated. Is this what they call AI? Nearest number/decision search?

Kindly try to avoid critic, I am having a difficult time understanding the already trending AI stuff. People say that the algo exists from long back but only now we have the compute power.

Some "engineers" entire jobs seems to only consist of enforcing ridiculous bureaucracy in multinational companies.

I'm not going to get specific, the flow is basically:

- Developer that has to actually write code and build functionality gets given a task, engineer needs X to do it - a jenkins job, a small k8s cluster, etc.
- Developer needs to get permission from some highly placed "engineer" who hasn't touched a docker image or opened a PR in the last 2 years
- Sends concise documentation on what needs to be built, why X is needed, etc.

Now we enter the land of needless bureaucracy. Everything gets questioned by people who put near 0 effort into actually understanding why X is needed.

They are already so much more experienced than you - so why would they need to fucking read anything you send them.

They want to arrange public meetings where they can flaunt their "knowledge" and beat on whatever you're building publicly while they still have nearly 0 grasp of what it actually is.

I hold a strong suspicion that they use these meetings simply as a way to publicly show their "impact", as they'll always make sure enough important people are invited. X will 99% of the time get approved eventually anyway, and the people approving it just know the boxes are being ticked while still not understanding it.

Just sick of dealing with people like this. Engineers that don't code can be great, reasonable people. I've had brilliant Product Owners, Architects, etc. But some of them are a fucking nightmare to deal with.

I feel like resigning from a company that i joined 3 weeks back.

I don't like to code in PHP and the manager wants to stick on to that , no new developers joining the company and php is one of the reason. The code is a mess. Every now and then some other team come running for a change like one button to do some shit and then for a fix after 15mins of release.

So many database operations are happening manually. No innovation in the team. Developers are very boring , women being senior developers and team leads brings stability but there is no innovation , excitement or any enthusiasm. All my team members are very happy doing mediocre shit. Manager talks about agile development and they are following that at a level where every half a day some requirement changes.

I m tired of being a developer that fixes the same mediocre shit.

Its too boring.

Me and my developer friend worked with my ex-colleague with this fitness directory website because he promised to give us {{ thisAmount }} upon the {{ completionDate }}.

He was my friend and I trusted him.

It took me weeks of sleepless nights building the project. I had a full-time job that time, and I worked on the project during evenings. All went well, and as we reach the {{ completionDate }}, the demo site is already up and running.

A week before the {{ completionDate }}, he hired his new wife as the COO of the startup. It was cool, she keep noticing things on the site which shouldn't be there, and keeps on suggesting sections that has to be there. I was okay with it, until I realized that we are already a month late with the deadline.

Every single hour, I get a message from them like, "it's not working", "when can you finish this feature?", blah blah blah.. and so on.

I got frustrated.

"I want my fucking life back", I told them. No one cared about the {{ completionDate }}, the sleepless zombies they are working with and our payment. They keep on coming up with this "amazing" ass features, and now they are not paying because they said "it's not complete".

Idiot enough to trust a friend. I was unprotected, there was no legal-binding document that states their obligation to pay.

My dev friend and I handed over the project to this web development company which they prefer, and kept a backdoor on the application.

I kind of moved on with the payment issue after a month. But without their knowledge, I kept an eye on the progress and made sure that I still have the access to their server, DNS, etc..

BUT when they announced the official launch on social media, I realized that I was on the wrong train the whole time.

They switched to a different server.

They thanked all the people involved with the project via social media, EXCEPT me and my coding partner who originally built the site from ground up. A little "thank you" note from them will make us feel a little better. But, never happened.

I checked up the site and it was rewritten from originally Laravel 5 to CodeIgniter 1. That is like shifting from a luxury yacht where you can bang some hot chicks, to a row boat where your left hand is holding the paddle whilst your right hand is wanking yourself.

I almost ran out of bullets.

Luckily, CodeIgniter 1 was prone to SQLi by default.

I was able to get the administrator password in plain text and fucked with their data. But that didn't make me feel better because other people's info are involved.

So, I looked for something else to screw with. What I found? A message with the credit card details.

Finally, a chance to do something good for humanity. I just donated a few thousand dollars to different charity websites.

A rather happy/neutral post this time for a change. Lol

Firstly the good news: I have successfully recovered from the emotional/mental abuse and have been doing really well. My faith in myself has been slowly restored.

Secondly, I have started to pursue my hobbies again and find joy in them. I spend more and more time listening to music and play video games (CS:GO and AoM).

I have started getting more sun and also spend time outside socialising.

I can sense my happiness and joy get restored in my life.

Now on career front, I have started job hunting again as you all know. The interview process for Product Management is absolutely broken and taxing to go through all the loops.

During all my previous job hunts (three times), I was able to nail down at least one offer in a quarter.

This time, I started in October 2021 and still no success. I have much more experience and skill-set this time yet failures.

Fear not. My optimism is back this time. I am aware of where I am going wrong and sometimes I feel the situation is truly out of my control. The two major reasons I forsee are:

1. Relocation: it can take few months for me to relocate to UK/EU and hence, companies are preferring local candidates.

2. My duration with current employer is just 8 months which could be a potential turn off for many HMs. They might think I am a job hopper and maybe one of the reasons why I got so many calls and opportunities at my previous employer (I was stable with them for 7.5 years).

I feel it's just the matter of time for me now where I must hold my horses and keep the momentum without losing hope.

I will win.

What a silly end of the week. Have to continue developing at a project a student started at our company. Today I had a phone conference with the client. They told me there where missing several data. At first I thought it is only a frontend issue but now I know it is a database issue so I have to work through several database procedures which are all undocumented and the student who build those is not reachable. Business integration ftw

I work in a team where I am the only person not belonging to the main company. We have been a year and 3 months working together and they still don't realise that I have very restricted access to many of the things related to the project. So every now and then, something breaks and we have a meeting where they all tell me how disappointed they are at me because I was responsible for that and then I try to show them how I could not possibly even access the information where it is stated that I was responsible for that thing. Or that that thing even existed.

And then, the move the conversation to why they won't pay for my ramping up. This is not ramping up, assholes, this is you allowing me to access the information I need to do my job as you want!

I really don't know what to do... Other than looking for another job

When you start a new project with 2 more developers. You see their CVs and they look experienced.

(Fast forward one month....)

You realize you are the most experienced one and they are waiting for you to guide and mentor them.
The worst of all I thought I was going to learn from them because I still am not ready to mentor other people.

Aaaaaand now I am panicked.

I miss the time where I used to sit in my corner, do the tasks that was given to me and that's all. Now I have to code, build documentation, assign tasks, etc. I am not ready for this. I never asked for this. I just wanted to be a developer. :( :P

This rant is not about avoiding bad company but instead: If you find your self in a bad company make sure to note what is bad in terms of:
1. What is wrong?
2. Is it wrong by your book or by everyone's book?
3. How things should be done if you were in charge?
4. Are you able to be productive if those "wrong" things where done correctly? For example if they should have used gitlab cli for auto deployment, do you know how to do that? No? Learn. Yes? Move to the next item in the list

There is no way to avoid bad companies unless you are really lucky, just make the best out of where you are now :)

!dev (?)

Ughhh
I hate fucking school books,
My students get their books from the school, they got a 2014 edition, I got them from my employer, I got the 2019 edition.

"How different could they be?"
Totally different, the chapters are in a different order(Who learns classes before loops and conditions???) everything is different. "Okay", you might say, "surely it's just just a few pages prior or later right?"
No!
"So open your books on page 69(lol)" *Starts explaining*
Students: *Look confused* "ehm, Soldier? Are you sure that's the right page? I don't see the table"
Me: "Lemme check I'm not wrong" *Looks at the book* "Yeah, page 69, you see the table at the bottom?"
Student: "No?" *Shows me book*
Me: "Wait, that's not what I have, can you show me the book?"
*Looks at book, it's a completely different subject and chapter*
*Goes to ToC, finds the place where the table is*
It's on page fucking 98, this happens for a few more times.
"Okay forget the book, I guess I'l just draw everything on the board for now."

Fuck you book publishers or whoever is responsible for this cashgrab of planned obsolescence.

!devButAlsoKindaIsDev

Alright, time to do some explanation.

TL;DR: JavaScript is a fucking nightmare. May god help every web developer out there. Essentially, I was gone because of JavaScript.

Q: where tf are you bruh
A: in your mo-uhhhhh alright, so I was chosen to be the main developer for an interactive promotional video for my school (every year the school holds something called an open day, where kids from 8th grade can come to the school and have a tour in the school first hand. Because of the coronavirus (just gonna call it “the rona” from here) this is now impossible so we are losing the interest and the first impressions so the school decided to make an interactive virtual one). They asked me if I want to do it and I said yes.

Boy, was that ever a mistake... (hint: it was a huge mistake)

So the guy who talked to me and asked if I wanted to do this was my grade’s manager, and he gave me the phone number of my PM. So we talked and stuff, and then this happened: (bruh = PM)

bruh: I’ll send you the API and documentation for the thing that we are working with! They have lots of examples and stuff and they’re Israeli too!

Me: Okay! What language are we talking about here?

bruh: JavaScript.

Me: (questioning life choices) Okay!

I didn’t write any JavaScript for the last 3 years or so. It had to be done because I promised and I can’t let down people who count at me and ask me to show where I shine.

So, what was the objective for me? Build a Firebase client that sends the user’s score and choices to Firestore after he chooses something in the interactive video (for example, go to chemistry or go to physics) while learning JavaScmeme (ECMEMEScript) as I go.

Deadline? A week and a half.

After working almost 12 hours a fucking day, I made it work. Sorta. In order to reconcile with small exceptions and edge cases in the interactive video, I had to hard-code some IDs in the code. I had no choice, since I couldn’t allow myself to spend more and more time to make my code more dynamic than it was because I simply didn’t have time. The code absolutely STINKS but it works.

Today is the day where we (aim) to finish all of the cosmetic things that we need to fix. All of them are non-essential for everything to work, but we want to make this thing presentable because we want to put this on the school’s website.

CONCLUSION:

JavaScript is literal shit. Dynamic weakly-typed languages are cursed AF and need to die in a fire.

Our project at work goes live in 3 weeks.

The code base has no automated tests, breaks very often, has never had any level of manual testing

will not be releasing with any form of enforced roles or permissions in our first release now due to no time to enforce, however there is a whole admin api where you can literally change anything in our database including roles.

We also have teams in various countries all working separately on the same solution using microservices with shared nuget packages and they aren't using them properly.

Our pull requests are so big - as much as, 75 file changes - in our fe app that I can't keep up with it and I honestly have no idea if it even works or not due to no automated tests and no time to manually test.

We have no testing team, or qa team of any sort.

Every request into the system has to hit a minimum of 3 different databases via 3 different microservices so 1 request = 4 requests with the load on the servers.

We don't use any file streams so everything is just shoved in the buffer on the server.

Most of the people working on the angular apps cba to learn angular, no one across 2 teams cba to learn git. We use git so they constantly face problems. The guy in charge has 0 experience in angular but makes me do things how he wants architecturally so half the patterns make no sense.

No one looks at the pull requests, they just click approve so they may as well push directly to master.

Unfinished work gets put in for pull request so we don't know if the app is in a release state since aall teams are working independently, but on the same code base.

I sat down and tested the app myself for an hour and found 25 fe only issues, and 5 breaking cross browser issues.

Most of our databases are not normalised. Most of our databases make no sense. 99% of our tables have no indexing since there is no expertise with free time to do it.

No one there understands css properly. Or javascript.

Our. Net core microservices all directly use ef in the controller actions so there is no shared code there.

Our customer facing fe app is not dry because no tests so it was decided it was better this way.

Management has no idea on code state, it seems team lead is lieing to them about things like having any level of tests.

Management hire devs that claim to be experts but then it turns out they have basically no knowledge of what they were hired to do, even don't know what json is or the framework or language they are hired for, but we just leave them to get on with it and again make prs too big to review.

Honestly I have no hope that this will go well now but I am morbidly curious to watch. I've never seen anything like the train wreck that we are about to get experience.

So I tell my coworker how ticking noises of clocks can annoy me really bad. It is an OCD thing where I will not notice a clock, then I notice the ticking and it annoys the hell out of me.

He leaves the room after a while after turning on a fucking youtube video with 11 hours of ticking clock.

I am like, "You fucker..."

Then another guy we work with comes into the office and pretends like he is wondering what the ticking noise is.

I said, "Yeah right, he sent you in here to ask about didn't he?!" He was like "maybe..."

Anyway, that must mean I am part of the team now. They are screwing with me. All in good fun.

So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.

Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.

So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.

So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.

So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(

2017 has ended and I want to throw this fucking rock of anger with it out of the Window.

I will tell you how my last 3 to 4 years as private IT Guy (IT Dumpster) for everything was.

My Gaming Community:
It was so fucking retarded that I would like to punch everyone there in the face over a thousand times.

Seriously there are over 60 People in that Community and they take every shit for granted and only cry about everything.

I'm Paying since 4 Years over 60 € for our Server every month. Some people donated some small bucks over the time and in the end it was around 150 € Donations over 4 years.

Im thankful for the Donations, but these people really think that they can demand for this Donations private Gameservers for over years for free or think that they now own the Servers. WTF?? FUCK YOU!!

Im managing 2 Linux Server with Web, MySQL, Voice and Gameserver. What did 1 guy donate? 10 € for 4 years, thats around 15% for just a month. You would get our Teamspeak for 7 Days for that price idiots!!

I did all the damn Webdev and am now writing a App in Kotlin for Android man!!

Since last everybody in the Community gets on my nerves, because they are so ignorant and dont appreciate the work of others 😡.

My Association where I support the hole IT with a friend:

We decided in the commitee that we would take on major changes in our infrastructure.

We need to finish the barebone concept in the end of January 18.
Early December 17 I wrote my friend, that we need to have a meeting and plan everything.

Well, now I mostly designed the roadmap by myself and didnt receive any reply from my friend 💀.

I really dont understand why the shit always sticks at me and I need to finish it.

I really love to code something, install or repair PC's with joy or manage Server but the people around me are in my free time like poison and they take out my fun for it.

The only fun and enjoyable IT Part for me is at my fulltime job. Thats the only good place left for me as Safe Heaven and the people there really appreciate my knowledge and work I do.

Im getting annoyed by the new layout of google. Hovering the sidebar will make a scrollbar appear but the main part of the site's scrollbar will disapear. This results in most content moving from their original place. Let's make a Stlyish script to fix this problem I thought. Guess what now somethings stay where they should be, but the things that were first on the right place have moved. Also this will make the header shorter. I'm getting more and more amazed how shitty some frontend devs are at google.
To fix one bug they, instead of solving the bug, tried to counter the result of the bug.

I do like the z-index of the sidemenu though (it's 2005, the year youtube was created)

My current job at the release & deploy mgmt team:

Basically this is the "theoretically sound flow":

* devs shit code and build stuff => if all tests in pipeline are green, it's eligible for promotion
* devs fill in desired version number build inside an excel sheet, we take this version number and deploy said version into a higher environment
* we deploy all the thingies and we just do ONE spec run for the entire environment
* we validate, and then go home

In the real world however:

* devs build shit and the tests are failed/unstable ===> disable test in the pipeline
* devs write down a version umber but since they disabled the tests they realize it's not working because they forgot thing XYZ, and want us to deploy another version of said application after code-freeze deadline
* deployments fail because said developers don't know jack shit about flyway database migrations, they always fail, we have to point them out where they'd go wrong, we even gave them the tooling to use to check such schema's, but they never use it
* a deploy fails, we send feedback, they request a NEW version, with the same bug still in it, because working with git is waaaaay too progressive
* We enable all the tests again (we basically regenerate all the pipeline jobs) And it turns out some devs have manually modified the pipelines, causing the build/deploy process to fail. We urged Mgmt to seal off the jenkins for devs since we're dealing with this fucking nonsense the whole time, but noooooo , devs are "smart persons that are supposed to have sense of responsibility"...yeah FUCK THAT
* Even after new versions received after deadline, the application still ain't green... What happens is basically doing it all over again the next day...

This is basically what happens when you:=
* have nos tandards and rules inr egards to conventions
* have very poor solution-ed work flow processes that have "grown organically"
* have management that is way too permissive in allowing breaking stuff and pleasing other "team leader" asscracks...
* have a very bad user/rights mgmt on LDAP side (which unfortunately we cannot do anything about it, because that is in the ownership of some dinosaur fossil that strangely enough is alive and walks around in here... If you ask/propose solutions that person goes into sulking mode. He (correctly) fears his only reason for existence (LDAP) will be gone if someone dares to touch it...

This is a government agency mind you!

More and more thinking daily that i really don't want to go to office and make a ton of money.
So the only motivation right now is..the money, which i find abhorrent.

And also more stuff, but now that i am writing this down makes me really really sad. I don't want to feel sad, so i stop being sad and feel awesome instead.

!story

As is the case with many of you, I am also the de facto technology fixer for my family, and usually the first one they call when something goes wrong.

Usually it's a 'something wants to update, should I do it?' simple issue. Other times I have to remote connect to see why Word isn't uploading templates correctly or whatever.

Yesterday was different though.

Me: So whatcha need?
Mom: Well, my office has recently wanted me to be remote-capable in case they need me for something and they don't have the right people to fix it (she's been working at the same office for 20+ years and knows basically everything)
Me: Okay. So I guess they're setting up a VPN for this?
Mom: Yes. And I was calling because they might try and install it on my personal laptop and I wanted to know whether or not I should be concerned about our IT guys being able to look at or steal all my personal data.

I then proceeded to explain how a VPN works and that convincing her company to provide her with a separate computer would be the safest option and whatnot. But I was honestly really surprised that she was concerned to begin with.

For a while now, it seems there's been one story after another of companies being irresponsible with their customer's data, with little to no reprocussion or action that could really make a difference.

But as a direct result, we're now getting to the point where even the tech illiterate are becoming more aware of how this is effecting them.

It gave me hope for the future in an industry where many times there is very little. And I hope it does for you as well.

Thanks, mom. I'm proud of you.

A little background of me. I’m a firm believer of knowledge is power, skill is practice and hard work. Especially for this field, it’s easier to self learn the skills or language these days without having to take loans or burn a huge hole in ur wallet and stuff. But i personally feel, it’s hard to follow an effective path of learning when the info is everywhere. So have to be careful with that. (that’s why I’m here to learn from experts, lurking around)

Sure, degree is just a paper or validation that this person has completed this and that. But doesn’t reflect their actual skill. Especially for this field where u can just show ur skills by making projects. If ur potential boss is impressed by ur skills, u are hired. BUT if ure in Singapore, they require u to have degree by law. No matter how skilled u are, u only get specific amount of salary within a preset range. The range goes by Diploma, Degree, Master, PhD. Etc. U will still get hired by a company if they like u, but won’t get more than a preset range.

I was contented with just my Diploma. But decided to get degree cuz I wanted to earn more. And now considering to go for ms, just cuz my current company gives sponsorship.

Aside from salary, I do think getting a degree in University is one of the important phases of the life, where ure working hard, trying to juggle different things. Also, u do get other perks being a uni students, like discount for books, get access to latest devices if the uni has.

But all in all, whatever floats ur boat, right.

Thoughts prior to feedback meeting, about how it's gonna go.

---------------------------------------------------------
Scenario one:
Supervisor: The shit is this? You call this a research work? Get the fuck out of here! You're fired and even your unborn kids are banned from coming into this institute ever again!

Me: *walks out sobbing* (dunno how one can walk out of a zoom meeting, but this is imaginary so who's counting?)

Scenario two:
S: Umm, good work. I just don't think it's presentable. Maybe come back in like a few weeks when you actually polish this into a "real scientific work".

Me: *sobs after meeting. Starts preping for seppuku cuz no idea where I'm headed with this work any further*

Scenario three:
S: nah man. This is no good. Let's start from the bottom. Like, start data collection from the beginning or something.

Me: *sobs and commits seppuku on the meeting.* (I just have a pen tho. Hope it has the same effect as a sword)

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

There are other scenarios, but they all end up in me sobbing and/or committing seppuku in/after the meeting so yeah the drama is running high right now.

So I got approached by a recruiter... not from a recruitment consultant company, but from the company offering the position - which is a refreshing change. Now I have a dilemma....

On the other hand I’m really interested in their offer since the way they approached me by basically saying ”noticed you can do F# and we need F# devs” - so I have a chance at getting a job programming with the language I really like. And these opportunities don’t come around often, since F# isn’t really widely used anywhere it seems.

The caveat is, I really really enjoy working where I’m at now, even tho I mostly work with PHP (with the occasional Vue, C# and F# thrown in), but the atmosphere is unparalelled, my colleagues and my manager are the best, and the benefits are better than most companies can offer - so I’m a bit reluctant to change employer, especially since I have personally interesting projects coming up soon on the roadmap.

What should I do if the details for the offer I get are worth considering?

Here we go again. Months have passed since this client first wanted their website launched. But because they were suddenly and inexplicably in no real hurry to make it go live, we are now waiting for them to get back to us on whether to push to Production. Meanwhile, I have bills to pay and as soon as I told them I need the check by no later than April 1st, everyone over there is no longer answering phone calls or emails. Voicemail box is full and not accepting any more messages.

I think this would be the part where I call "Big Nick" and ask him to pay them a little "visit". If I knew someone like that.

The emphasis on "team" to the exclusion of the individual (thanks in no small part to Scrum) is destroying the software developer career. It's a pendulum. There are always team/company goals AND personal goals. However, these days, the rhetoric is ALL about the team: everybody on a team has the same title, get rid of people who don't conform to some "collaborative", "open space", "colocated" ideal, etc. OKRs are entirely about giving everybody the exact same goals. I remember sitting down with managers throughout my career to talk about where I want to be in a year. What skills I wanted to explore. There were no guarantees, but the generally accepted idea was that nurturing the employee helped retain the employee. Now, there is only the idea that every developer should have the same "T-shaped" skillset, that all team members are the same, that all teams are interchangeable, that all developers are nameless cogs. It is demoralizing. If I were to give any advice to those looking to enter the industry as a developer right now, it would be "Don't". Because you will be told that being a "hero" is a bad thing. In what other industry does management tell its producers that they don't want people to go "above and beyond", and that if they do, they won't get credit for it because the credit always belongs to everybody.

Depressed since yesterday.

Updated all our clients Dialers. Stellar performance. Suddenly one of 15 can’t hang up three way calls.

It’s one of our biggest clients. And they just started. We upgraded the dialers so the answering machine detection would improve for them and it did, along with vast performance upgrades as well. Suddenly, this issue.

2 days in they pull the plug until we fix it. The issue is sporadic and we cannot reproduce. No one else is having the issue. I can’t even debug it properly as it’s a third party dialer with no customizations on it. I found out where the error is, but no idea the workflow they got it to happen with or why. It’s so frustrating. It happens using the dialer native interface, and our integration via api calls. The channel doesn’t get sent to the command for some random reason, and only sometimes.

So even if it’s fixed they don’t trust the system. Now they are losing the full integration we have with the crm and dialer and it’s going to be a mess of data for them. All because of this one issue. They love the CRM though...

If they had just stayed on one more day I’m sure I could have found it. Now I have to play forensic scientist and look through old data, without being able to see the client code that was causing the issue.

Just threw some cash down to be able to talk to the dialer engineers and hopefully see what’s up. What a nightmare. And I have so many other projects for the platform due so soon...

Sigh. Super depressing.

So I am a part of this volunteering initiative where one of our tasks is to assist people in distress (virtually).

Now this activity is led by two chipmunks. One claims to be a therapist who themselves is seeking professional therapy from someone else and the other is a corporate HR.

Well that information should be enough for you to understand how chaotic the situation would be.

But allow me to continue...

So they decide to go about an activity in the group where everyone has to share a meme. Some of the cringest memes I have seen in my life. One of them went to an extent of sharing a husband wife joke as a dark joke.

Next day, someone spammed in the group and one user sent a sticker of some character hanging from a rope. It was evidently a fun and sarcastic sticker which they all use.

But all of a sudden the chipmunks got offended and went on a delete spree warning and banning users.

Most of the time, the group is dead and another group where they plan shit is more active. Full of mindless opinions and worthless conversations.

All they are doing is spamming everyone and forcing people to participate in the name of volunteering.

What's more exciting is, they control it so rigidly that no one, except the two chipmunks, is allowed to even have an opinion or disagree with them. If you do, they'll belittle you in front of everyone.

Yes, you guessed it right, the entire initiative is a massive failure and being dragged in the name of hElPiNg pEoPlE iN dIsTrEsS

tl;dr Do you think we will any time soon move from editing raw source code? Will IDE or other interfaces allow us to change the code in graphic representation or even through voice?
---

One thing I found funny watching Westworld is how they depicted the "programming" - it is more like swiping on a smartphone, a bit maybe like Tom Cruise's investigations in Minority report. Or giving certain commands and key words by voice.

There was one quote from Uncle Bob's "Clean Code" I could never find again, where he said something along the lines, that back in the seventies or eighties they thought they would soon raise programming languages to such a high level they would use natural language interfaces, and look at us now, still the same "if's".

So I feel uncomfortable without my shell and having tried a graphical programming language once this particular (Labview) seemed clumsy to me at best. But maybe there are a lot of web devs here and it seems with them frameworks you might be able to abstract away a lot of the pesky system programming... so do you feel like moving to some new shiny programming experience or do you think it will stay the same for more decades as the computer is that stupid machine where you have to spill it out instruction by instruction anyways?

Tl; dr: Linux on Ryzen is a pain at the moment.
Now for the long part: Our student council got new computers because the old ones where slow as hell. As one of the admins, the others and I together decided that ryzen would be a good option, because they are not that expensive and we wouldn't have to buy gpus. (Wrong decision it turns out.) We settled on the ryzen 3 2200G and bought three systems to replace the old ones.

We meet Saturday morning and build the systems. All was fine and we were happy. The we tried to install ubuntu via preseeded netboot, which seemed to work fine at first. Then we started having weird screen issues and couldn't proceed with the installation. (See image) we then grumpily decided to just install them all one by one, flashed two usbs and started installing. On two systems the installation worked and we installed our packages, we weren't so lucky with the third one. It would crash on us all the time, even in bios. While that was going on we tried to set the other two up, turns out those two were also crashing but not as frequent as the other one. So we start to google and find people saying that kernel 4.19 kinda fixes it. We install it on the two working machines and the crashes get less frequent but are still there. At that point it was midnight and we went home.
Sunday morning: we reseated the cpu on the third system and it seems to be better now (it installed on the second try) and we were able to change the kernel. Yay. Now all three are in a state where they will sometimes randomly reset. :/ and we don't know what to try anymore.... Any suggestions?

In cour company we need an online dashboard that monitors logfiles from various interface processes.

My collage and me, the newest company members (for almost 2 years) get the task to build this and get it presented as some intern project where we can try out some more recent technologies/frameworks.
Now in the first meeting our senior team leader told us we shoeldn't use the noew hot buzzword js frameworks.
Reason? They are not proven and wil probably lose popularity next year and we don't want to migrate everything every half year. Plus he had negeative experiences with Angular in some project he had to work on, probably just because his limited JS skils.
So he wants us to use jQuery to build a modern web application.

I get it you don't want to migrate to TheNewHotThing(tm) every year. Guess what? You fucking don't have to. If I build sonting in Vue.js now, it won't stop working when a new framework comes along.
Look at our own fucking ASP.NET Web Forms prooject, that stil works. Just don't deny the usability of modern frameworks.

So now Microsoft is suddenly deciding devices that "weren't" compatible are now perfectly compatible with Windows 11, and they're rolling this out in bunches at a time.

I still get "This device can not support Windows 11" but my coworkers are starting to see "Upgrade NOW!" and it's honestly gotten a bit sour seeing as I may be next. They're bypassing those who're editing the registry to stop this, too.

If I have to start diving into the deep ends of Windows and find out what IP Windows gets it's updates just to slap it into my HOSTS file, we're already in the apocalypse.

This upgrade is not bad for common people, but upon seeing that the Start menu GUI and taskbar got butchered horribly (I place my taskbar on top of the screen, Windows 11 doesn't allow for that) I myself absolutely want as much distance between me and that shit as possible.

In college, I've been hearing my fellow classmates having issues with Windows 11 left and right, including with how hard it is to get another browser to even work, to the Windows Store not even downloading Microsoft's own apps, to endless update loops, to the infamous "Update of Death"

Keep in mind, they got computers with better specs than mine, and they're having a worse experience. A lot of them just got refunds to the very last issue I just mentioned, all within August, day of purchase to day of return.

Microsoft, I am begging you for mercy, I'm so close to just getting up, finding out where you are, and blocking you from my network at all network and device levels.

1. When i was 11 years old i came across a trojan horse program and i sent it to all my school friends to get their messenger password.
(I had a list of passwords of all the people in my class... dont worry, i didnt even used the passwords, i just stored them in my list lol)

2. Took data structures 10 years later, hated it and switched to electrical eng

3. I was working on a manufacturing plant as the lead engineer and one of my prototypes was misbehaving and i was blaming software and software was blaming me...typical stuff... So i said "im going to get a masters is software so i can know wtf you are talking about, and tell you that you are wrong😠!!"

Got in school, started in the masters and quit that place i was working for 🤣.. (they were shitty people and unethical business... fyi)

Now im back to where i was was when i was 11... (minus the hacking email accounts of my classmates)

We need an open-source alternative to stack overflow. They have fucking monopolizing pieces of ratshit admins there and lame ass bots.

I HAD A FUCKING 450 REP :/ and now i have "reached my question limit"

I mean its okay of you want to keep stackoverflow clean , but straight out rejecting the new queries should be against your god damn principles, if those mofos have any!

If it is so easy to downvote and delete a question for the mods, why can't they create a trash site called dump.stackoverflow.com ? whenever a question is not following their stupid guidelines , downvote it to oblivion. After a certain limit, that question goes to dump space where it will be automatically removed after 30 days. Atleast give us 30 fucking days to gather attention of audience !

And how does a question defines someone's character that you downright ban the person from asking new questions? Is there a phd that we should be doing in our mother's womb to get qualified as legitimate question author?

"No questions are stupid" is what we usually hear in our school/college life. And that's a stretch, i agree. Some questions are definitely stupid. But "Your questions are so stupid we are removing you from the site" is the worst possible way to deal with a question asker.

Bloody assholes.

Now, can anyone tell me that if am passing a parcelable list of objects in an intent before starting a new activity, how can i retrieve it in the new activity without getting any kotlin warnings?
The compiler is saying that the data coming via intent is that of list<Type!> aka list of platform type, so how to deal with this warning?

A few months ago I bought an e scooter to get from home to work.

The backstory to this:
My car broke down on the highway, my sister's car broke down on the highway and we didn't have another car apart of my dad's anymore.
Which means I had to look for another car. The cars between 1k-5k € are dogshit and when you want to register the car you have to have an appointment at a government building which happens to be closed when I'm getting out of my 8-5 job.
I had enough and bought an e scooter.

Now back to now:
In the beginning it was cool.
Could get anywhere I wanted to in combination with the Germany ticket. Except for the Netherlands where my beautiful girlfriend is.
There I can legally not use it but that's ok lol.

The German government is hyping e mobility and public transportation up, but for what?
E mobility currently sucks ass with all the shit laws for e.g. e scooters and when you want to transport it in public transport, people give you weird looks, the bus driver wants you to buy a bicycle ticket even if I can fold the e scooter and more. The scanners in the bus of the German buses cannot read my German ticket for some reason and every bus driver in my city knows that and they just look at it and are like "Ok, you're cool. Continue moving", but this old grandma looking ass bitch is like "No, according to the law you need to show it to the scanner and not to me". I fucking know. I've been doing this shit for a year and you know that but it doesn't work. It says to me that I need to show it to you instead of to the scanner bc this machine is fucking dumb and apparently I'm holding the people because I started a discussion with her. This driver ... ugh. The buses in my city come whenever they want as well.
Like sometimes 5 minutes earlier, sometimes up to 30 minutes later.
Inconsistent motherfuckers and I am the one making everyone wait? Suck my donkey kong balls.

German trains... well you know how that goes. It doesn't. It sucks ass.
Every single fucking train line has a problem. Either a previous train has something, or staff is missing, or a technical error or the train driver's ass is itchy and needs scratches from his assistant. There's always something.

When I want to travelled home from my gf I spent not lying 8 fucking hours on the trains on Sunday.
Normally it takes max. 5 hours with a train and 3-4 hours with a car.
I can also go on a rant because of the Dutch train system because it also sucks, BUT they are reliable. They are there when they say they are gonna be there. 99% of the times.
In Germany it is somewhere at 10%.

Now I realized that e scooters are uncomfortable and expensive toys who need maintenance just like a car but nonetheless they are reliable unlike the public transport.
In the winter it will be even worse.

Electrical cars are way expensive and affordable electrical cars you need to keep charging every few baby steps.

I also looked at 125ccm motorcycles which you can drive if you upgrade your existing car driver's license, but ngl that's a scam. Not worth it at all.

And that's why I am looking for a traditional car now. E mobility is not there yet in Germany and public transport is not doable at this moment.

I've always liked Windows more than MacOS, but known deep in my heart that MacOS is more polished. More shiny, attractive, makes more sense, is easier to use, etc. Windows was never that far behind (however, they were probably furthest behind in Vista and 8), but they were always behind.

Looking at the new MacOS, I genuinely think that Microsoft offers a better experience now. While Android and iOS are still firmly battling, Windows just beats the living shit out of MacOS.

Windows is an OS built for either touch or mouse. If you use touch controls, the OS automatically adapts to it (larger context menus if you press and hold, smaller ones if you right click). You can enter tablet mode. The start menu has a good interface for both touch and mouse.

MacOS is an operating system designed for touch input on a device which famously has none.

It has fallen victim to a very common design error: too much fucking spacing. Every little thing, even items in a list, has a ton of pixels between them, and they all have rounded corners. Again, this is common for touch displays where you don't wanna fat finger stuff. But they don't offer a touch screen Mac and have expressed no interest in ever doing so.

Now they're going ARM on custom silicon. This is a good move in the long run, but it's going to be a rough couple of years. Apple admits two. You can probably reliably double that.

Is Apple killing the Mac on purpose or by accident?

During 6 months I updated myself day and night on java, springboot and AWS.

I failed most of the technical interviews on my preferred stack, however I got a job, where the probable stack is C#, dotnet and Azure.

So, I have a couple of weeks of very good quality rant ahead.

I just started.

hmmm let's see, should I use Visual Studio or Visual Studio CODE. I spent the morning before understanding they were different. I could have spent the morning Studying how To Visually fuck you, lame name chooser.

Now I'm following a tutorial.
I need .NET 5.0, but guess what, I have .NET core 3.1.
But wait, fuck, .NET and .NET CORE are not the same thing! Will .net core 3.1 work for a .NET project or not?

And there goes the afternoon. Is he the same guy who choose the names?
I'll tie you with a barbed wire net and fuck you to the core, you asshole

I just saw a news article (nope, not sharing it...don't want them to get the clicks) where they said it's now considered passive-aggressive to use the following emojis (the percentage is a non-specific n-value and N-value...probably 3...of how many younger folks think it makes you look "old" to use these):
1 - Thumbs up - 24%
2 - Red love heart - 22%
3 - OK hand - 20%
4 - Tick - 17%
5 - Poo - 17%
6 - Loudly crying face - 16%
7 - Monkey eye cover - 15%
8 - Clapping hands - 10%
9 - Lipstick kiss mark - 10%
10 - Grimacing face - 9%

I previously only ever used thumbs-up and checkmarks to signal that I understood the message sent to me. My new goal is to use as many of these as possible when messaging anyone under 30. If you are so butthurt by ANY emoji, then you certainly deserve what's coming to you.

300 global variables.. THREE HUNDRED FUCKING GLOBAL VARIABLES?
Are you for real?

Now let me check the line numbers again..

hmm.. line 97 to .. yep line 410, just a few new lines to seperate some of them or.. group? Idk, I've given up on trying to understand those.

Now you may ask "But ThatPerlDeb, where did you see this and what was the intention?"
Low and behold, take a chair and I may explain this to you.

First of all: Fuck the dev that wrote this!
Second: Fuck all the devs that kept up with this practice or whatever you want to fucking call this!

Now, the application is our POS system that our customers can use for a monthly fee (That this piece of garbage even requires payment is disgusting) but anyway..
The global variables sometimes are declared for labels, sometimes for some frames, sometimes just for random values to be there.

We're using Perl for the POS system and Perl ain't the best at OOP, so in the dev's defense I can understand why you'd use a few global variables, but not fucking 300!! FUCK OFF WITH THIS BULLSHIT!!

So now I'm going through this torture slowly but surely deleting globals and putting them into some sort of scope and always MANUALLY test if something broke. Again, this company sucks ass and there's nothing that could even be considered a "unit test" or something like that, so fuck that, too.

After two hours I've brought down the count of global variables to about 260, so there's progress being made..

But then, there comes more!

"But how???" you may ask, and you're right, I've asked that myself.

Now to resolve the global stuff in each file some of the initial globals are used, we got about 20-30 files which do different stuff, all fair and square, at least there was an attempt at seperating functions but god this mess is so fucking fucked up. So in order to "safely" delete a global variable I have to check if any of the variables are used in another file, and if so, in which scope and how they are used.

Spaghetti would be a compliment for this fucking disgusting piece of utter bullshit.

Let alone the code quality of this "code"
Indendation? Dafuq is dat?
Scope? Nah, we got everything global anyway
Function size? Well, some are 5 lines, some are 900 lines, who cares anyways, right?

I'm so fucking glad once I leave this shithole, for real.

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

Today on forgotten games – Vangers.

Even though the game is extremely hard and very, very frustrating, it somehow has an ability to make you obsessed with it. A very complex pieces of information, either carefully crafted or accidentally emerged from the void, delivered straight to your brain, making you an addict. If you play it and not delete it after five minutes, there is no way back – you better get used to new, different you.

There are many hard but addictive games based on simple mechanics, but Vangers is a different story. Compared to Vangers, Dark Souls seems nice, simple and easy casual game.

One can easily imagine "the hardest game possible", but all of them simply makes you delete the game and not to play it at all. Vangers precisely balance over this, achieving a very fragile equilibrium, being hard enough to frustrate you like no other game does, but not hard enough to simply make you quit instantly. While doing so, the game makes you a junkie, addicted to its eerie psychedelic nature.

This game spits in your face. This game makes you a slave, a desperate addict. All of your previous gaming skill, and speedrun experience doesn't matter.

The plot roughly goes like this: humans fucked up while experimenting with portals and accidentally discovered an advanced hivemind race. Trying to escape they fuck up spacetime and the two incompatible civilizations annihilate each other, creating a primal soup of creatures, from which the whole new world emerges. So there are many different strange creatures trying to survive in fucked spacetime where incompatible worlds are forcefully fused together, and you are the Vanger, one of many other Vangers trying to figure out what they are and how they was created.

The game features a voxel, fully-destructible world mapped on a torus. The game lore and terminology are extremely complex, and no one will explain it to you, you have to figure everything out yourself. Skip the dialog and no one will repeat it, you're on your own now.

Every playthrough is different. There are very many game mechanics and play styles available.

Everything in the game including complex rendering engine was written in C and Assembler back in 1998.

There are two types of Vangers players: the ones who was able to escape early and the ones who think that Vangers is the best game of all time. This says it all.

Last warning – DON'T PLAY THIS GAME. You better watch some playthrough on youtube.

Personal update:
So i have been to psychiatrist few days ago. I got a prescription for anti depression drugs and today is the 4th day of my therapy. I feel a bit better. At least i can sleep can focus on things. Unfourtanetly mentaly i dont feel better. That rant that i wrote before didnt help me neither (i deleted it). That drug that im taking has a shit ton of possible side effects uncluding anger. My massive untrust to people dosent help neither.

To anybody who didnt read the previous rant. I have meet a classmate that had a idea for a android app. I have fought he is one of that bad, stupid kind. I was wrong i said bad things to him but eventualy i helped him by showing where he can get help with the app.

I shouldnt have responded to him in the first place. Now i feel bad. I have no idea how you are going to respond im scared. I prejudged him but im now sorry. I have no idea how my life is going to go.

I also have tried applying for a awesome C# internship, perfect for a student: paid and might get experience in C#. I have send them 2 emails on the address that they gave me during open days (where i had talked with HR and devs personaly about their job) and i got no responce since last month...

Finals for the first semester are closing in as well. I dont know if im going to pass or not. And that is the worst thing i have to worry about now.

on my college days (8yrs ago), i had to study COBOL as part of syllabus....

you had to write lots of codes as header on every simple program you write, define every variable you gonna use (with how much space they need) upfront..

and you can't leave a blank space any where in the code unless it is required!!

best part? you need to start every line of code with 7 blank spaces! and each line should end at 72 chars...if you have more to type in a line, the next line's 7the char should be a dash(-) to indicate so..

and the compiler's error messages are shit!

now, even with modern languages, people think its hard to code!

Just got into a company as a fresher. Have never liked doing frontend (no offence). They are making me do frontend. Now, I'll forever bear the tag of a frontend developer. Can't quit due to money issues. Don't know where life will take me.

I have a big problem guys. I am so stressed out that i have been crying for the past few hours. I joined this company as a fresher 2 years back by signing a bond that i'll have to pay them if I leave the company. The bond is going to be over on 25th Nov,2023. They extended the bond by 3 months. I was a desperate kid back then who had pressure from family. Now the situation is that i have performed well throughout my working period. They are heavily underpaying me. Now i have 2.5 years of experience but freshers are earning more than me now. They had been giving me work every now and then. Now they have made me the lead of a new team where i have to build the world's most useless framework that does not even make any sense. The most suitable developer who was also my senior refused to join the team because he knew how useless the work is and is going to take the troll on him. Now I have to do it.
My manager said that you are going to do this and the deadline is 3 months. Which is not even feasible. This is utterly stupid. It's a waste of time. I am so fucking stressed out because of this and how much freshers(interns whom i trained) are earning more than me.
I have a notice period of 3 months. No companies are willing to hire because of this notice period.
If I resign now, i have to pay them 75k rupees and plus I have to eventually work for 3 months. I can't do this. What to do in this situation.
I am trapped.

If you want to make a startup but don't because there is a similar product or "every niche is already occupied", quit thinking this way.

Yahoo could once easily buy Google. They even received the offer but rejected it. But as for now, Yahoo is nothing.

Tumblr was once a top social network, but they crumbled. Foursquare once was preinstalled to smartphones, and now it pretty much doesn't exist.

Blackberry was a giant, the number one smartphone manufacturer. Where are they now? It wasn't betrayal like it was with Nokia and Stephen Elop.

Matter of fact, I'm now working for the company that entered a heavily occupied niche and over the course of three years pushed every competitor out.

Sometimes giants crumble. Small products crumble way more often, just because there are more of them.

There is always enough room in every niche of every industry. Just enough for your startup. Now, as you can't hide under "it's already occupied, and I can do nothing about it" mindset, the only reason your startup won't make it is that you don't work on it. Yes, accepting it is way less comfortable than hiding, but now you're able to change things. You _can_ do something about it.

Evaluate your goals, ask yourself whether making this startup would be just wasted time in case it never takes off, and if you think it's still worth doing, do it.

There is always enough room for your masterpiece.

I usually crib about how stupid people are and how I struggle to stay afloat.

Let's switch some gears now. A post about some good people, product, and processes.

You know what the common theme here is?

The goodness here cannot be measured. Your first interaction with them makes you feel so comfortable that you start feeling butterflies.

These people just keep on giving. They are selfless. They are pure. They actually care.

And when you think it's done, then they give you some more.

What blows me away is, they don't expect or accept anything in return. Absolutely nothing. Not even a simple thank you.

And they are like a wizard. They walk into your life when you least expect them but need them the most. And when the task is done, they'll be gone before you even know.

No lingering, no drama, no bullshit. Just pure goodness.

Like my ex-lead in current company, I have a very senior guy in neighbouring team (for which they were gonna hire me initially), who also happened to interview me, is a gem.

He takes care of me like his own younger brother. Supports me and always answers my queries no matter how occupied he is.

And same is with good products and processes. They feel effortless. So smooth and add exceptional value to your existence. They give rise to wonderful companies.

You'd never experience a single negative aspect about them. No matter how much you try, things will just keep getting better until they don't need to.

And then they'll be long gone. Never to be seen again and never to be forgotten.

You cherish them only in your memory and wish they lasted longer. But they didn't because the purpose was served.

Such people and experiences inspire me. They push me to become a better human.

No matter how the world is or how it treats me, I must always live with high values and be a better version of past self.

The other evening, I was conversing with my mother where we spoke about some family friends who are insanely wealthy but humble and kind.

Mom and I mutually agreed that they don't have such good traits because they are wealthy, but they are wealthy because they live with humility, kindness, and pure intentions.

World is surely a beautiful place because of such people and I aspire to be one. May lord guide me well :)

Ok I know there have been a lot of similar rants to this one, but now I have to write one by myself!

Fuck freelancer.com or whatever that shit is called. I once started using it when I was in school because I thought it was a convenient way to earn money on the side without fixed work times, so I could adjust to how much time I have. But soon I realized that wouldn't happen. It is easy for me to make a website, I have written some css templates from scratch and can apply them, but when will these cocksucking assholes learn that $25 for a website is not only a joke, but a fucking insult? Or a logo for 4? In his video on fiverr, pewdiepie has a point on the thing where he said that you can shit out a logo in 2min and make an easy 4 to 5 bucks, but I like doing things more properly and I bet those fuckers will give you shit for not designing the perfect logo. I once accepted a job where I ended up busting my ass 3 days log for $100 and I thought that was the normal mess at the beginning, before you have former customers rate your profile, but I got perfect ratings and still didn't get or even find any proper jobs. Most are complete shit, like write a fucking book for me or design a fucking Website or pull a logo out of your ass, but some projects are just rediculous. I once saw a project where they wanted some engineer to do the layout for the pipes in a huge processing plant. Yeah, because engineers are so poor and unemployed, even when they are entrepreneurs they dont go to those shity sites. Since I am actually qualified for such a job, I applied just to see if I could land a job that is actually not shitty, but of course it turned out the person had no idea what he was talking about. It is basically a platform where people can pay you in exposure. And the absolutely fucking worst thing about it is that they get away with it. There are always a ton of people, mostly from countries where cost of life is significantly lower, who flood the freelance market with cheap, presumably horrible logos, mobile apps, websites, texts and apparently pipeline layouts. I haven't found a similar platform but where there are only high quality biddings. But that is something that I would love to use.

Sorry for long rant, no potato.

i have been applying for jobs recently, and after getting some HR interviews that evolved to tech interviews, i just cancelled them all...

Every company seems to have hacker rank, and online coding sessions as tech interview stages which really stress me out. Its like everyone thinks they are google and its ok to make people go theough this pressure to join them.

I dont mind being given 10 days to implement a complex project, after which im either in or not. But 20 mins to solve something online while either the interviewer is watching me or the automated test is waiting to filter my application out... i get anxiety just thinking about that..

so im gonna stick with my current job for now, and focus on building my own business slowly on the side. I really felt anxious because of those tech interviews these past weeks and i feel so much better after cancelling all of them.

if a decent company comes along with the project approach, id love to apply, but otherwise ill just stick to where I am for now. dont know if im being immature or irresponsible career wise or if this decision will blow up in my face

stay tune to find out !

What are the chances that you get busted by your manager and 3 team leaders you personally know when you are going to a job interview?

We have poor men’s silicon valley near universities. Our company’s one office moves to another university. By the one in a million luck, interview takes at the same building where our next office of my current company will be. Managers and team leaders are there to inspect the new office. I enter the building, see them near elevator. One of them see me, with panic i wave my hand to him. There is a distance of ten meters, I hide behind a column. The team leader who sees me waving thinks I am with them to inspect new office. He asks others why am I not coming with them as I learn later. I can not pretend to play along and catch up with them, due to panic and time of interview is soon already. They get into elevator and finally I dont have to hide anymore 😂.

I got into interview and c++ exam with that physcology. Little did they knew that I just completed CPP PRIMER book. I both rock interview and exam but lets see if they will return with a job offer. What a rollercoaster of emotions.
Note: I am on mobile now so can not give more juicy details for now, fingers are tired.

!Rant
The new bill passed the house for ISP to be able to sell data. This get me ticked off. I already ausme that ISP did it under the table. Doesn't make it right. Now it legal for them to breach our privacy. At what leave do i need to run my own internet just to feel safe. VPN can sell the data, ISP can sell data about you. I spend my life teaching how to protect people online and now I can't even say they are safe at home from someone with wrong intention. A quote​ comes to mind.
"Dear lord I need to see some change, because the man in the mirror is wearing a mask"
I shouldn't have to feel every time. I boot my PC, that I need to remind my self that what I'm doing now is being sold so someone can lable me. When will the common man learn to protect their privacy online; And where is the line in the sand?

It not all bad, this event has given me the itch to code. Just to spin some heads I'm going to make a script to make random Google query across the widest array of topics, so my profile is full of contradiction.

The few who read this have a nice day!

Oh god... technical decisions should be taken by people who actually know what they are doing and even so still counter-checked and not followed blindly.

I am currently working in a company that wasted millions by trying to implement micro-services where they don't belong and didn't step back when they realize it was a mistake

(protip: micro-services usually don't belong in most places).

Now we're dealing with the sunken costs fallacy and I am seriously believing that the company is going bust in a few months. Let's wait and see.

!rant + !story

I hate every human on the planet that says WFH is just people pretending to work or are slackers looking for an easy way out.

Now the story bit.

In 2021, I joined a company (I really wish I could name-drop the company), where the micromanagement was OFF THE CHARTS.

The company got a client who pitched a product they wanted built and gave us a super reasonable 3 months to complete it. I was really happy about the timeline and kept working under keystroke monitoring, which I didn't really mind at the time.

3 days into the development, the client informed us that they are pulling the funding i.e. they don't have money to pay us.

So at that point the client gave us two choices:

1. Stop the development right away and get paid for the time that we put in already.
2. Finish the project under 9 days. We would still get paid for the 12 days total, mind you. Not the original budget set.

So the motherfucking boss chose the second option and then the chaos ensued.

Devs screaming at each other on calls/slack. The boss yelled at us all the time about the completion. It was wild.

I had to wake up at 7:30 AM and start coding and log off at 11 PM for literally the next 9 days including Saturday and Sunday. No holidays allowed for the timeline. This was all at a WFH job.

So fuck anyone that says WFH is easy and just for slackers.

I just found out my parents have less than $30 in the bank by the end of each month after all expenses...

We are not living. We are barely surviving....

Every day in my house it is dark and the lights are off. They turn all lights off in order to avoid getting a high electricity bill. I have to use my phone's flashlight as the main source of light in my own house, as if i live in abandoned cottage in the middle of a forest.....

Both my parents are jobless (have been their entire lives). They just borrow money from their family members and grandparents to pay these bills every month. They depended on luck their whole lives. A luck in context of "maybe if i dont work anything at all then a huge pile of money will fall down from the sky!".

So now I, as their son, have to grow up in extreme poverty and fight my way up, because of DUMB, STUPID people. They are good people, but what does being a good person bring if you are fucking stupid and valueless?

I knew i was poor but today i found out i was THIS poor. I had no idea we were THIS much poor. Because today my 4g internet got cut off due to not paying bills. The bill is $30. My dad cant pay it cause he doesnt have $30 in the bank. I was in shock. So i had to pay it

My $8.125 usd an hour backend software engineer + DevOps engineer (2 jobs in 1), is considered as LUXURIOUS SALARY, in the most corrupted country of Europe -- SERBIA 🇷🇸

When i tell the world i make $8 an hour with a computer science degree working as a software engineer, they laugh at me. People mock me "bro even a mcdonalds worker earns $17/hour what are you doing" im doing what i was born into -- born into poverty of a third world shithole country.

With my $8 an hour salary, i am in TOP 3% of the HIGHEST earners in serbia. Can you fucking imagine how miserable lives do people live if this is not even an average salary, but among the ELITE salary? Because the average salary in Serbia, is $3.75 usd an hour, sometimes even less than that.

When people say "its not about luck its about hard work", please, GO. FUCK. YOURSELF.

Go and be born in a shithole third world country. Now on top of that be born in poverty due to poor decisions of your parents. Go ahead and try it. Lets see how hard you fucking have to work to get to the same level compared to someone who was born into for example America, where you get paid 6 figures immediately after graduating computer science. Or on top of that, you're born in a wealthy family in america. Did you work hard to be born in the 1st class freak show or were you LUCKY to be gifted such life?

My whole life i have been fighting to get money and escape this misery due to poor decisions of my parents.

Very ironically, my parents have lived extremely luxurious lives in the 90s. They had 5 cars. 1 huge house with a backyard garage private office private jacuzzi private gym. This house was worth at least 500k in the 90s. Today this house would cost at least 1.5 or 2 million. They went to luxurious travels. Hotels of $5000 per night per person. Literally wasted 45k in 3 days just for hotel. They even GAVE AWAY FOR FREE money to our relatives and cousins, taking them on luxurious vacations for free etc. None of those people appreciated them, none of them came to help them in tough times, everyone forgot about them and abandoned us.

Like i said, my parents are good people, but what does it profit being a good person if you are FUCKING STUPID.

They were extremely LUCKY but their STUPIDNESS has made them broke. I couldn't be THIS much fucking stupid even if i tried hard.

Nobody is coming to save us. No one cares. Its all up to me now. All the pressure and stress and poverty is passed and inherited onto my life now. its up to me to either get rich or end my STUPID bloodline

I am living a very difficult life and no one seems to understand this...

!dev but is somewhat tech related

So I was like 7. I was hanging out after school with a friend who's mom worked there. We were in her office. So there was a song l really liked are the time (Song of the South by Alabama) and it was on a CD.

So I put that CD in the computer and play my favorite song. Well literally 15 seconds after a line in the song, which was "Sweet potato pie and I shut my mouth," played, my cousin who was in another teacher's office decided to
prank call us.

What did they say when I picked the phone up and said hey? "Sir your order for 1,000 pounds of sweet potatoes is ready to be delivered."

I nearly shit a brick as I slammed the phone down and started freaking out. I ran to where he was and bust in there to see themn laughing really hard

Now I look back and laugh, but I genuinely
thought that by somehow playing that song ordered a lot of potatoes.

And the wild part of the story is that of literally all the things they could say, they chose sweet potatoes. Like it still blows our minds that that's the choice he made.

I am starting to get really annoyed by shitty devs and tech leads from other teams that ask me to fix urgently a "problem" with my project they rely on, but turns out they did not even debug the fucking thing in the first place to understand where the problem comes from.

Turns out someone used the wrong parameters on his duct taped jenkins CI and instead of finding the reason for the failure, he just assumed my code did not work.

This is the last time I'm helping you fucks before a release while I am on holidays in my country. Worst thing is you guys are paid twice my salary in US dollars but you still can't code and debug for shit.

How about telling me truth when I asked you guys if everything was working fine before I took my vacations? Do you fucking test your shit for fuck's sake? Nah you guys just suck ass.

I will turn off my computer when off work from now on and uninstall slack and emails from my cell phone. These guys are not competent enough to use those tools properly.

So this will be my first rant/story sorry if it gets too long.

So finished work and I was like finally some days off, went to bed, woke up the next morning, went to near city to take care of some work, went back and I noticed they were digging the ground near my place, as I've found out from neighbors they were changing some pipes, well ok no problem arrived home, sat on my PC to study a bit and do a bit gaming, but guess what?? NO INTERNET well ok contacted the ISP, the idiots told me it will take them 2 days to arrive WTF? is this 2018 or 1918?? I was so pissed off but ok the next day they called me that they arrived, they checked and said that they will need to fix some wires they will return the same day.. so I've waited few hours but no internet, the asholes didn't came, so the next day they arrived and guess what?! the idiots that digged the holes cut the wires, instead of fucking contacting the ISP to ask for supervisor to tell them where they can dig they didn't know what was the fire for and they thought oh well lets cut the fucking wire, and instead of stopping and contacting the ISP about their mistake they continued with the digging and cut the wire at 3 places, so the ISP at the end called the police, the plumbers that did the digging where just laughing, why do you laugh you primitive ashole, even 10 year old would first ask if it can continue if it finds something that he didn't know about it (I call primitive the person not the job title), and the best part is that the idiots not only they cut the wire at 3 places they also took part of it out of the ground and then they filled the holes back! Now I won't have internet for 2 fucking weeks, yes in 2018 this is happening, at that moment I was so pissed, but kept my cool and contacted the ISP to give me LTE USB stick to use it for the next 2 weeks, sadly they couldn't do that wtf??? So I asked politely who will pay the damage for me not working for 2 weeks and they said that they will gladly pay the damage.. So I was confused because that literally meant that they will compassed me for the 2 weeks, so I re-asked are they sure about that and they said yes, so lets see what it will be done, in the meantime I solved the internet problem by using my phone to access internet on the PC.. But still its amazing how primitive people can be and how ISP don't have alternative solutions for such cases, just to point out this sam ISP bragged how they will be among the first to bring 5G when it arrives... LOL

My shortest naps are giving me the worst nightmares where I wake up before the alarm. These mostly consist of violence around. People running in groups with HUGE rocks to thrash onto others, violence on a daughter by her own family, people completely destroying terrace walls.

This needs to stop somehow. It is clearly influenced by the things happening around the world right now. I just don't understand how will we ever reach a point where there is enough peace. A point where humanity can be understood without baseless justifications.

Being a hothead maybe doesn't mean you need to heat it up every time before using it. Anger against any injustice can be put to really good use. But going around destructing someone's mental health or physical belongings and then later faking regret after knowing the truth is 😔

Please. "Look before you leap." OR if you've already leapt, think twice of the outcomes and what lead you to doing something so disturbing, so easily. Sincere apologies could convince the affected person to not jump off the cliff.

I swear the affected ones can be capable of equally powerful and destructive revenge. But they somehow manage to take the "there must be a reason" path and choose to see the good in everything. Sadly, this certainly starts with home.

Postman Rant

wow just wow ! just got turned my home internet off by the cable company. And they are right to do !
I apparently didn't sent them their money. But why didn't I ?
Im the typo guy who likes a bill in any type and then pay it. Sorry for beein old fashioned there. Now this lack of human intelligence aka. my postman didn't brought me them. Instead I always receive others Bills and shit( ok sometimes he drops it right ). Does he think the people
in this house live in a fuckin hippie community or some
shit where we all are one system. WTF ????

But my revenge will come you giant shitpile, except from reporting you to your office.
You FUCKED with my internet connection. That's personal

I'm so fucking fed up with the npm ecosystem. Every single god damn time I've had to do anything it always takes DAYS to figure out how to get anything working and I always have to try multiple tools or libraries to final get it half way sorta.
I'm so fucking annoyed right now. They always turn out not that great, have lacking features or trivial oversights in functionality and ALWAYS have garbage documentation.

I just want to build a fucking npm library with TypeScript to be used with node. That's probably the NUMBER 1 use case so how fucking hard can that be?

So obviously I start out with tsc. That's quite simple, compiles all my stuff and shits out .js and .d.ts files. Okay so how do I use them via es6 import? I don't fucking know, because it doesn't work no matter what I do. The 'module' option in tsconfig is absolutely useless btw. It does *literally* fuck all. Nada. Absolutely nothing.
Okay I'm far from defeated, maybe I'll just have to bundle it. So I waste two days finding something that half works (I'm using fusebox right now) and at last I get a stupid es6 module as a single bundle... But what about type the declarations? They are nowhere to be seen and of course there's no option for that. Because Fusebox the pile of shit that's oh so well Typescript integrated apparently doesn't think TYPE DECLARATION FILES are needed. What the actual fuck.

And that's where I'm now. I need the fucking .d.ts files so I can use it as a module with import. Do I really need another fucking piece of shit tool that bundles these files? Honestly fuck all of this. "Oh the Javascript ecosystem is so great" YEAH fucking great, alright. Where 90% of the ESTABLISHED tools and libraries (we don't talk about the landfill of all the other shit) flat out don't do what you need. Again, how fucking hard can it be to make a npm lib with typescript? That should be NATIVELY SUPPORTED. If not by npm atleast by typescripts tsc.

FUCK NPM. FUCK JAVASCRIPT. AND FUCK THE WHOLE ECOSYSTEM

Prequel to my previous post:

I received an offer from a startup that did not meet the originally advertised salary range. In every other aspect this place seemed like where I'd enjoy working the most and each previous interaction made a very good impression on me. So needless to say this was quite a shock.

They immediately apologised and explained the situation. They only now started to expand to and hire from my location (which can be verified) and I would be the very first person from this location (seems true too but I could only really verify this after joining). They explained the salary range I had seen was for their main hub location (accurate too) and said that the recruiter who posted the ad did not adjust it to mine. I asked why tf they didn't notify me of this earlier and they said they are super busy with everything, are new to location based salaries and normally don't check the recruiters posts as it should be her work.

Now, even if this is totally true, it was an awful sudden shock and felt a bit like a scam - totally contradicting my previous impressions.

Here are a couple of other points that I'll just sum to save time:
- before seeing the job ad I had a *reasonable* salary expectation even lower than their actual offering
- on the ad, the bottom end of their salary range far exceeded my reasonable exp.
- the relative level of my position would be even higher up the range that I have seen realised would be top 5%
- having had seen the ad, I started to have an *ideal* expectation being the bottom of the range
- in first interview I told them my exp. is the bottom end of their range +- a bit
- I told this to a dev guy who has no fucking idea about this stuff and I don't blame him but he noted this down to higher management
- generally I have not been very precise of my expectation as previously I only had lower class dev jobs, this would be the first decent.
- Hence I have seen an enormously high variation in salaries offered to me so this advertised range whilst high seemed possible

Now, with all this in mind I posted here a question about what some of you would do in my position.

I received the following group of responses:

- it's a scam, bad place, run
- it's an intentional (common) trick
- people make mistakes like this esp. startups so find out if this is intentional or not
- just decide if their current offering is reasonable for the position and location, ignore the rest
- just decide if the amount is enough
- location based salaries are retarded, don't work there (I kinda agree and also don't)
- if they can afford the higher pay in another place they should have no prob. meeting the range
- it's more important that you'd enjoy it there if the pay is sufficient for general needs
- company culture is generally more important these days
- fuck recruiters and hr people (amen to that btw)

Here is what I did:

Regardless of whether I believe them or not I hyperfocused on the potential scam/trick aspect.
I told them that every other interaction with them was positive and would love to join them but this was a really bad impression and feels like they are playing with me. I made up some bullshit previous examples of companies trying the same trick on me (which obv. never happened).

Then I said that I think to resolve this they should invite me to their main office for a day (all interviews had been online) and if after that they are still not ok to offer me at least the bottom of the adv. range then we can part ways. Otherwise this should ensure both of us that we are a good match, etc.

They seemed to love the idea and said that I should go there for x till y (3 days) and if we don't hate each other by the end I'll get the amount at the bottom of the range and they apologised again about it looking like a scam, etc.

So thanks a bunch again to those of you who provided valuable input.

PM looking at Concept Design: "There were checkboxes and now you have radio buttons"

Me: "Those are two separate screens. One is the user inventory, the other populates an add"

PM: "So which is it? Are we using checkboxes or radio buttons?"

Me:"...both? Each where it makes sense?"

PM: "So what's the point of the radio button? If the user can only click one row, why do we need a radio button?"

Me: "Visual representation of what they selected. We could use row highlighting as well, it doesn't really matter"

PM: "But what's the point?"

Me:"...."

Watching police interrogation videos right now, the channel called “EXPLORE WITH US”. Goddamn, US police/investigator system is _way_ ahead of russia’s. You can remain silent, you can just refuse to testify, and the interrogation will be over, they use REID technique, other tricks to make people talk without resorting to violence. In russia, they either torture you into admission, or straight up put you to jail and that’s it. They don’t want justice, they want to put someone in jail, guilty or not, and call it a day. Case solved, good job guys.

And yes, I realize MKULTRA existed, I realize there is Guantanamo Bay prison where terrible things happen, I realize US system is far from perfect, and accidents happen, there are very bad cops, etc., but in general, US system is a paragon of humanity compared to what happens in russia.

If the US system looks good compared to something, you know that something is truly fucked up.

So I'm making an app with a classmate at school, but there's one huge problem. All the PC's and laptops at school are shit. The ICT departement at my school blocks almost everything on them. I can't install any program, open any file and I can't even open the command prompt! So I can't install Visual studio or any other IDE and basically can't do anything besides browse websites that aren't blocked. And they expect me and my classmate to make an app. Fortunately, my classmate has a spare laptop we can use, but it's really difficult for two guys to code on just one laptop. I asked my school if they could buy new laptops or if they could remove they restrictions on two laptops, but they don't want to do any of those things and now we're stuck with just one laptop. I don't know what to do. I fucking hate this!

(This doesn't have anything to do with the topic of the rant, but I just want to complain.)
There are a couple more things I hate about my school. At my school, everyone is forced to use iPads. I don't know why they don't just give us laptops instead of iPads (maybe just because there lazy). So my iPad's headphonejack and homebutton where broken for no reason and I had to get it repaired. But instead of going to an apple store or a repair shop, you need to go to the school's ICT department and get it fixed there. If you don't do that and go to a apple store or something, they will take your iPad and keep it forever! Even though you pay €200 for it every year! Also, the ICT department at my school is lazy as hell! You expect them to repair the iPad themselves, but they just send it to a repair shop. So it wouldn't even matter if I would go to the store myself! 😠 And they even do a really bad job at checking if the device even works after the repair, because I needed to get it repaired three times in a row! And don't even get me started on the bad WiFi connection.

Brazilian health ministry got a ransomware attack this night.

Why? Not because every city is demanding you to show you're vaccinated in order to go somewhere. Because you have to show it using a 20+ year old system.

Don't get me wrong the UI is nice.
But the servers...

Well, at least I have a document where my shots are registered.

And good luck to us living in this country, where we're known for gorgeous cities (people too) but also for a government that earns 200k+ while working 2 days a week and can employee 40+ people for sitting there and do no fucking shit.

No wonder if you get bad news from here every now and then, it's all true.
The ministries are dumb.
The president is dumb.

And worst. People too.

People don't care. Because they don't know they are part of 94% of more than 200 MILLION that earns minimum wage and strive to live bc the country BUYS things that we ALREADY PRODUCE and have to put a tax to every product to compensate them paying 5x times more to buy in dollars.

Well,
At least I'm not depending on this sucker of government, never cared about it.
You guys deserve to collapse and become poor again

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

There is no damn worldwide shortage of Cobol devs. There's a few localised, highly publicised cases where those devs are needed, those cases are diminishing fast, and that's about it.

Please stop touting this nonsense that everyone who learns Cobol can just drop into a job and make 6 figures. The only thing that's going to come out of this is a worldwide surplus of devs who learnt Cobol, and are now gobsmacked no-one wants to hire them to work in an antiquated language they have zero real-world experience in.

There.s this thing where you can donate pc capacity to do medical simulations on protiens. It helps to understand deseases.
Its called "folding at home"

They now running studies on corona.
So today i started up my old mining rig again (6x rx480's) and set it up to run in the corner of the room. It acts as heater and since winter is starting here i decided well why not heat up my room while someone else use those gpu'sto study corona..

Well turns out mining rigs are still noisy! So much for that idea.

Well i will have to move it or no sleep for me

The feature was to parse a set of fairly complex xml files following a legacy schema. Problem was, the way this was done previously did not conform to the schema so it was a guideline at best, which over the course of many years snowballed into an anarchy where clients would send in whatever and it was continuously updated per case as needed. They wanted to start enforcing their new schema while phasing out the old method.

The good news is that parsing and serialization is very testable, so I rounded up what I could find of example files and got to work. Around the same time I asked our client if they had any more examples of typical cases we need to deal with, and sure enough a couple of days later I receive a zip with hundreds of files. They also point out that I should just disregard the entire old set since they decided to outright cut support for it after all if it makes things simpler. Nice.

I finish the feature in a decent amount of time. All my local tests pass, and the CD tests pass when I push my branches. Once we push to our QA env though and the integration tests run, we get a pass rate of less than 10%.

I spend a couple of days trying to figure out what's going on, and eventually narrow it down to some wires being crossed with the new vs. old xml formats. I'm at a loss. I keep trying to chip away at it until I'm left with a minimal example, and I have one of those lean-back moments where you're just "I don't get it". My tests pass locally, but in the QA environment they fail on the same files.

We're now 3 people around my workstation including the system architect, and I'm demonstrating to the others how baffling and black magic this is. I postulate that maybe something is cached in my local environment and it's not actually testing the new files. I even deleted the old ones.

"Are you sure you deleted the right files?"

"Duh of course -- but let me check..."

A famous quote attributed to Jamie Zawinski:
"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems."

I am living this nightmare. Joined a project where schmucks are parsing SQL using regular expressions. Talked to a friend, a compiler developer expert. He told me that regexes can't be used for checking if braces are matched. Pumping Lemma. Those fuckers should have used ANTLR or something. Anyways planning to leave this project.

Today I could finally spend some time reviewing the merge requests an intern made (and I occasionally helped).

My god, I want to put it this months amount of work an, put it in a trash, burn it and rewrite it before the fire is gone.

5 small and unrelated issues. The intern used branches with the correct naming scheme, but IT'S A FUCKING STRAIGHT LINE BUILDING ON TOP OF EACHOTHER.

Oh ans also they took the liberty to update the dependencies and the language versions used. There was no issue regarding this. It's the first branch in the line and it was called "update_<dependency>" where they just upped the version numbers of everything and then COMMENT OUT all mentions of <dependency> so that it compiles at the very least.

Now today I spend most of my time reviewing the code by fixing that mess. Thanks to updates I had to update the CI and replace some libraries that are now incompatible. Tomorrow I can finally inspect the shit itself.

On a positive side node, I removed node as a dev dependency and the size of the node modules went down from 128mb to 18mb

Anybody know any good .net web devs in Sydney? I'm sick of reading seek and LinkedIn resumes where 95% of the applicants have a phone number starting with +91 and are skilled in "user testing and SAP".

I mean, what are they expecting? "Absolutely sir, we will mail you a first class plane ticket right now for your interview! Oh .net was just a suggestion, you can code in COBOL if you prefer. And don't worry about that pesky working Visa, we can pay cash!"

Most difficult part is to work with company where all senior admins are from sales. They never f*cking idea about developers problems.

Just give time to end user customer before 3 month schedule. and now thinking, we can do 3 months working in 4 days.

The sales people think nine women can deliver a baby in just One month. just pushing me to hire new developers.

Back in my study days software dev was this weird almost magical thing where you tell a electrocuted stone in a fantasy language what to do.
Now after working in the field for 4 years it has lost its shine and I mostly connect software dev to work grind and people who complain even though they just don’t read.
Maybe the time is near to look into a new field of work. Maybe it’s just not my kind of work to earn money. It’s not even like my higher ups are unsatisfied with my work. My current boss complimented my work a lot in our meeting last week.

Is this normal for developers to feel/experience?

So I'm on my morning stroll. Walking, enjoying, watching the world around me.. It's nice how cherries blossom. They smell very tempting to stop there and enjoy the moment. Some flowers under the cherry...

Why do plants blossom again? Oh yeah, that's right, to exchange some speciments in order to grow fruit and seeds. To have their offspring. Just like every other living macroorganism [with a few exceptions ofc]. Life has no other way to survive but to exchange genetic material between two parties and only then trigger growth of the new life.

And that is a very strict rule. No more, no less: it takes exactly 2 organisms to make new life. But why is that? If my memory serves, theory of evolution says that life is like business: cut the losses and let the profits run. Over time it discards everything not required for the organism in order to save energy, and only successful new "investments" remain in the genome. The unsuccessful ones die before they proliferate, so the bad genes shall not survive.

It also says that very simple things, very simple changes lead to very complex outcomes. Us. Life.

But what is simple about life having to need 2 other lives? Exactly 2. It's either simple or efficient, depends on perspective. BUT IT IS NOT BOTH. Look at cells. They just split in half and multiply. Dead simple. It takes one of them to make another one. But with mammals, birds, reptiles, plants and other macroorganisms [excpt fungi] this is not the case! Why?!? I can't think of any scenario where two generic microorganisms, following some dead simple mutations, would come up w/ something that inefficient and overly complex. Like they're living on their own, multiplying by division, and smth very simple happens and they can no longer divide, only mate in pairs. The primitive, efficient and simple mechanism gets terminated and replaced with a different one, incredibly complex one!

Sure, we have protozoa which have similar reproductive mechanisms. They exchange genetic material to multiply.

But look at our, human cells. They dont need that! Look at some reptiles, some plants that only take one to make another. They don't pair as well! It's simple. Efficient. Why do protozoa need 2 for the species to survive?

It's not simple and efficient [tho helps us adapt, but its not my point for now]. See, things like this make ne wonder. What if we, the life, are not as accidental as we think? What if this whole mechanism was set off by someone or something billions of years ago? That's mean there are much older, much more superior cognitive organisms than us. What if protozoa was version 3 of new life [the first two did not survive]? Viruses - v2? Sea creatures - v3, reptiles - v4, and so on until they came up with us, mammals? That'd surely mean we are not alone in this universe. Are they watching us? Will they create a new species any time soon? What's our purpose, are we just an experiment?

And so, from cherry blossoms to existensial dilemma, my stroll is over. Time for breakfast :)

<repost because previous one had many typos and grammatical mistakes>

I have arrived at a conclusion, rather two.

- I am a misfit who generally does not belong anywhere. Not that Steve Jobs Hipster type where you'd think I am a misfit genius. I am rather a misfit ignorant loser, at least for wide majority of things. I also have some ego issues of being included, hence I often turn out to be an asshole if things don't go according to me.

- People in general will hate you for no reason. And hate you more for your success. They'd be happy at your misery and pain. If you are running, walking, or even crawling towards success based on your hard-work, they will be jealous. Only time you are valued is when they need anything or can extract benefits out of you. Once you are drained, no one looks back because for them nothing more is left that could be exploited.

As long as you are providing, you'll be included.

This has significantly affected my self worth. I have allowed people to take advantage of me at the cost of my self respect and time.

These people are narcissist takers.

But there is a very very small group of people in my life, many of them I haven't even met and/or less frequently interacted, who are givers.

During my time with them, all they have done is kept giving me. Even when I asked them to stop or tried to resonate their kindness, they refused and kept giving me more. Most wonderful and best people in my life. I never failed to acknowledge their worth and valued them more than they deserved.

As of now, life is a mess.

When my manager, blatantly miscommunicated several things to me a couple of years ago, and scapegoated me by saying a comment I NEVER once heard said about me, in any context ever, "you communicate badly-- you need to communicate better", I took it seriously.

Fast forward, two years later. I'm doing wonderful at my job, yet I cannot get over that incident. I thought about it some more. Why did she say that to me? Why did she address it to me after her mistake? Why was she not aware of the real reason I missed the meeting?

Out of all useful bits of knowledge I gathered over the years, it's kinda comical that psychology came in the most handy at the workplace. There's very little to be gained from trying to psychoanalyze strangers, friends, and family... but it's almost saved my life at the job.

You see, if I attack an approach even in the most formal tones, or even worse, defend my approach, there's nothing coming from that. The situation now becomes my situation. When I become "aware" of the truth of the situation I become able to control the situation, not just myself. That way, you're not in a fisticuff fight with your boss, and you are not left defeated by the situation. Exercising control of the situation in such a manner that they are left defeated by the situation, not by you directly, is the only way you can win as an employee.
Any other way, you'll get under-appreciated, underpaid, overworked, overlooked, etc.
So, my boss at the time, was defeated by the situation of her being a bad leader; and instead of clarifying those feelings to me or ignoring them entirely... she validated her false self using her real emotions.

You can only reverse that, by developing fake emotions, to display a real self.

They can't blame you, and when they feel self-defeated, they cannot pretend it was you who caused it (bringing it back to a sane level of reality). They might rage if they're childish but it will not cause a single hair in your body to twitch because you did not "respond to their email" or "throw someone under the bus for their convenience", the situation did, they beat themselves by attacking you while the situation came down on them.
If I had to explain I would say that the situation is controlled by creating a mirror of the employee that follows their orders perfectly. That employee won't feel defensive: they already do everything right. The employee is crafted by becoming aware of the teams impacted in the situation and their true intent and creating "the situation", "the owner".
"The owner" reflects to people from the perspective of the situation and not from your own. This way you can't make a wrong move and are not emotionally involved with yourself.
It enables you to emotionally notice others. It also makes you safe, because you have the situation-mirror that's really doing the battling. The situation-mirror eventually creates a situation where the other person starts attacking reality (the situation) instead of attacking you.

Now, it's up to you whether you want to use that as a way to cooperate with your boss to beat this new reality, or as a way to gain coherence on your reality outside of your boss. I have noticed most people tend to realize this somewhere along the line and retreat and stop fighting, and quit their jobs.

I've been doing this in a corporate environment for a couple of weeks. I have already become greatly stressed and subjugated by the company for which my company works for. 20 of them sit here every day and devalue everything. Yet.... They're completely incompetent, spoilt, lazy and worst of all, they control how the software is being created. There isn't a single person on their side responsible for their requests to make sense and work with each other. So you can imagine how much blame they need to assign to us devs. They don't know what they want but want something anyway and then they'll see if that's what they want but everything under the tightest deadline possible. They're all clients and they all escalate to the board of directors any bad word directed at them. So you can imagine the narcissism that develops in that environment.
I have made them argue with reality and self-defeat numerous times. They have now started to back off and are being more polite and courteous. They have also not escalated anything anymore. Just as I was faking "happy" while I felt intimidated by them. I have not committed a single angry act and yet they are not feeling superior anymore. The reality of the situation is that we need to make a software and if you make them battle this instead of battling you, they can't beat you.