Well, it happened. The stupidest request, no demand, I have ever, and most likely will ever receive...

Me: So what is it you're looking to do with your website.

Client: We're not showing up Facebook's home page. We need you to fix that. We have a budget of $10,000 to make this happen right now.

Me: As much as I'd love to take your money, that isn't something I can control. Every "home page" is profile-based, which technically isn't a homepage, but a "feed" that changes constantly. So say you create a profile on Facebook, only those you follow, and paid posts show up on your feed. What I can do however is use your budget to create and promote posts from your company page to show on users' feeds. If you're serious about marketing, we can start slow at $250/week, then work our way up or down based on results until your budget is exhausted, then re-evaluate the budget at that time. I can tailor a retainer for you based on the number of ads per week that you'd like to make.

Client: No, this is not what we're asking for at all.

Me: Okay...what is it you're looking for exactly? Run through this in as much detail as possible so I can get on the same page.

Client: We want to be on the main home page of facebook.com. We want our logo on that page when people sign up to make an account, linking to our website.

Me: That's simply not possible. That's Facebook's own home page. Nobody has a right to edit that other than Facebook itself.

Client: Bullshit. There's a Facebook developers section with APIs to edit and view Facebook's entire website. We would do it ourselves, but we signed up and don't understand how to change it in Chrome. That's why we need you and [referring client] said you were the best guy for our needs.

Me: That API has no control over Facebook's corporate data, including their own home page. That API designed ONLY for sections in which you are authorized to access or modify, such as your personal profile or created page for your business.

Client: We know that it can be done. If you don't do it, we'll find someone else who can.

Me: Well good luck with that, because the only way it would be remotely possible to do that WILL involve prison time, since that would be illegal. The only legal way to do it would be to buy Facebook, and they'll laugh you out of the building with that offer. But I'm done with this conversation because I have work to complete from clients that aren't delusional. Have a nice day! [hang up]

----

What. The. Fuck.

Management : "How long you think it would take?"

Me : "now this is a rough estimate, but I think building the back-end and database alone could take 6-months minimum"

Management : "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? YOU ARE NOT SERIOUS"

me : "its a big proj..."

Management : "I thought it will be something like 10 days, already told the client it can be done"

me : "but we are not ready"

Management : "how are we not ready? we already have the virtual 3D shop, and we can use this ready-to-deploy eCommerce service as our data base "
... "you need to figure this out, this is not acceptable" he continued

* 2 Days Later -talking to my direct boss *
Boss : "since you don't know how to do it..."

me : "what ? I didn't say I can't do it, all I said it will take six months"

Boss : "yeah yeah, anyway there is this studio, a professional polish studio, we called them and they can do it, we will sign a contract with them, this will let you focus on the front-end. good?"

me : "well alright then"

Boss : "please write a doc, explaining everything needed from the backend"
-to me that was the end of it, took a long time to tell me they made the deal-

* 5 Months later *
- "Abdu, can you come here for a minute..."
- "yes boss?"
- "the document we asked you to do for the Polish studio, did you specify that we needed an integration with the API we are using for eCommerce?"

scared to death I answered : "why of course I did!"
I ran to my PC to check it out because I didn't know, I forgot because no one even comment on my doc. I check it out, and it was clearly explained... I got relaxed...

turns out they didn't even do what we asked them for. took them 5 months, and with no communication whatsoever. all their work was useless to us. complete dump waste.

----------------
never mentioned this until a year later... in a heat of moment when they were asking me to make an impossible task with no men and no time... I reminded them of this story... management didn't like it. but it was the truth. they didnt push this crazily this time

Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

Dev: this task is done, can I put it in review and do something else?

Me: sure, of course.

Dev: cool, just be aware I'll make some changes to it later.

Me: ... wait, then it's not done.

Dev: no it is, I just need to re-read it and make some changes.

Me: yeah, so it will be done when those changes are made.

Dev: but I don't know what those changes are.

Me: ... I get that ... but ... ok I'm extremely confused. Why do you think it's done.

Dev: because I've written everything I need to and I'm happy with it.

Me: ok so why do you want to make changes.

Dev: I don't.

Me: ... ... ... ... you ... you are really not being clear. If you don't want to make changes, and you are happy with it, why are you planning on making changes later ... after marking the task as done.

Dev: well if I re-read it and see something I don't like, I would like to change it.

Me: ok, so re-read it as many times as you like and make as many changes as you like. But don't mark it as done until it is done.

Dev: but it is done.

Me: no it's not.

Dev: it is, look.

Me: ... yeah looks ok at a quick glance.

Dev: ok so I can mark it as done?

Me: are you going to make more changes?

Dev: yes.

Me: then no.

Dev: why?

Me: BECAUSE ITS NOT DONE.

Dev: ok maybe I'm not explaining it clearly.

Me: ... we can both agree on that. Ok so to summarise, we don't mark something as done until we have stopped touching it. We don't half finish something and say it's done and comeback to it later. We mark it as done when we are happy with i.....

Dev: but I am happ.....

Me: *raises hand* I repeat, if it's done, we lock it away and stop touching it. If someone reads it and complains, we can come back to it with a new ticket. But it's not done until we think we are ready to send it on.

Dev: I am ready to send it, I just may want to change it.

Me: ... ... ... ... ... due to a new policy implemented just now, we are only allowed to send 1 email to a person each week. So unfortunately we can only send on 1 copy. So when you have that 1 copy, let me know.

Dev: ok, let me re-read it a few more times then.

Me: there you go.

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

*sitcom audience cheers*

Thank you, thank you. Ok so far we've had a developer from hell and a CEO who shot to fame for being the first rectum to receive a passport and be given a job.

2 pretty strong entrants if you ask me. But its time to slow it down and make sure everyone gets a fair chance. Its not all just about the psychopaths and assholes, what about the general weirdo's and the stoners who just made life awkward?

So here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 3, "A".

"A" was a bit of an unusual developer, despite having a few years experience in his home country, he applied for an unpaid internship to come work with us ... probably should have rang alarm bells but hey we were all young and dumb back then.

I had to say I felt very bad for A, as he suffered from 2 very serious, and job crippling personal conditions / problems

- Email induced panic attacks
- Extreme multifaceted attachment disorder (also known in layman terms as "get the fuck away from me, and do your job" syndrome)

While he never openly discussed these conditions, it was clear from working with him, that he had gone undiagnosed for years. Every time an email would come in no matter how simple ... even the services team asking to confirm his staff ID, would send him into a panic causing him to drop everything he was doing and like a homing missile find me anywhere in the building and ask me what to do.

Actually "A" also suffered from a debilitating literacy issue too, leaving him completely unable to read our internal wiki's himself. Every week we had to follow a set of steps to upgrade something and every week to mask his issue, he'd ask me what to do instead ... no matter how many times I sat with him previously ... must have been truly embarrassing for him.

But "A"'s finest moment in the company, by far, was the day where out of the blue, at the top of his voice (as if wearing headphones ... without wearing headphones) he asked

"DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO SELLS POT?"

... why no, manager of the entire department standing behind you, I do not

... why no, tech lead talking to manager, I do not

... why hello 50% of my team staring at me ... no "A", I do not!

Needless to say all our team meetings were a little awkward for the next few weeks after that but hey who doesn't like being thought of as a stoner / drug dealer by their team mates huh?

Will A make it to the top of the list of most incompetent? Well he has some truly logic defining competition yet to be announced.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

Started talking about Pi-Hole (still trying to install this fucker by the way) today with a collegue.

He had it installed and showed me around a little.

CW: Alright give me an example then I'll show you wildcard blocking.
Me: google.com 😅
CW: *enters and saves it. then tries to load anything related to google.com*

*no google.com domains load, all give a blocked error*

Me: Works great!
CW: Yup.
...
...
...
...
Me: Uhm so you aren't like surprised that I went with google.com as example and that I'd genuinely would block it?!
CW: No, why would I be?
Me: Well, most people consider me paranoid/crazy the second they find out I don't want to use google/google's services.
CW: well that's fucking retarded. why would anyone redicule you for not using something you don't want to use. You'll have your reasons.
Me: So if I'd say i do it for privacy reasons, you wouldn't find that redicilous?
CW: No, why would I? Not using google (and for that matter facebook etc) for privacy reasons is very logical really.

FUCKING. THANK. YOU.

I feel like a fucking abomination at the moment.

I have been working on an app that is almost like Wireshark. More so for practice than anything else.

I decided that today I would try it out on the network here at my house, so I started the packet sniffer and wanted to see what was going on. I was checking for unencypted text (like telnet and whatnot) and came across this odd address that I hadn't seen before.

I did something that I shouldn't have done, and I fucking clicked and did the equivalent of "follow TCP stream" on wireshark. I fucking went and looked what the text being sent over this fucking network was.

It was my girlfriend, using fuck knows what messenger, but it was unencrypted. I just found out that she is cheating on me. I don't want to go into what the texts exactly say, because it fucking hurts me deep down.

Why didn't she just use whatsapp or something, fuck man. I really don't need this in life at the moment. I am genuinely trying to get my shit in order, I have been coding my ass off at night for extra money to make it, I have been working overtime where I can - fuck I have even tried sucking up to management (I would never do this under normal circumstances) - and to top this off, the motherfucking tax man is giving me hell.

Fuck sakes.

If you want to cheat, fucking do it properly. Because I am in a state of pure sadness and hatred and the moment - and I don't know what the fuck to do.

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

I'm tired of working for small companies.

I'm always either the sole developer, or the only dev for a specific stack, and therefore don't have anyone to ask for help. If I can't figure something out, it just doesn't get done.

It also means I don't have anyone to bounce ideas off, do code reviews with, or even friggin' have someone who understands what I do.

It sucks.

It would be nice to have someone I could actually ask for help! As it stands, I tear my hair out in frustration until I'm desperate enough to beg for help on discord or SO. whereupon, of course, I get ignored, as per usu. asdjfklasdjf

It really sucks.

It also means that I'm often surrounded entirely by sales people and managers... you know, those super-talkative people? who basically get paid just to talk? and are absolutely computer illiterate? Yeah. Think someone who says "I need my deliverables by end-of-week," "customer success representative," "turnkey solution," etc. completely seriously. (ew).

They're the people who constantly wonder why I can't push `n` features in `n/4` days, and ofc can't understand anything I say in response because of the aforementioned illiteracy. They're also the people who, almost every week, ask how long `y` is going to take, and then yell "But I need it by Friday! I just sold 50 clients on it!" (And they do this, of course, without ever asking for timelines)

It really fucking sucks.

Though I suppose larger companies would still have these problems.

but at least I could ask for help once in awhile. that would be nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big client, sells products in 30+ countries.

Tries to generate newsletter subscribers, so asks for a system to send a coupon upon subscription.

2 days later, client calls in panic. “We have too many subscribers, our marketeers say it’s a bot issue, can you do something?”.

Checked the data, checked analytics, turns out there’s a lot of referral traffic from freebie-sites, no sign from a bot issue.

Called the client back, “sorry, but there’s nothing you can do about that, you wanted your newsletter to become popular. Not you’re the victim of your own success”.

Client: “can we add captcha?”

Me: “why would you want to do that? You don’t even have a bot issue”

Client: “to make it harder for people to subscribe”

I tried to talk som sense in their heads, but after 3 times I gave up and implemented the damn captcha. It’s still there, doing nothing but annoying thousands of people, including me...

Watch 3 videos about iOS/Swift on YouTube, and now I'm getting a frontpage full of recordings of app development events and iPhone reviews.

Listen to one kpop track on Spotify out of curiosity, and now the recommendation playlist is polluted with music I really don't like.

If we are going to hand our balls to AI and expect it to be a glorious fondling fest, don't cry if it suddenly realizes "nuts? aren't those supposed to be cracked?".

I mean what's fucking next? Where will this "smart" shit end up?

I accidentally click on a my little pony meme, and amazon will drone-strike me with 500 gallons of glitter? I drunkenly mumble "OK google how do kangaroos fuck" in the back of a self-driving Uber, I'm going to be dropped off in a shady alley and raped by a dozen walibis?

STOP FUCKING TRYING TO UNDERSTAND ME, INTERNET. I JUST WANT TO FUCKING USE YOU, NOT BE USED BY YOU, THIS WASN'T THE DEAL.

If you truly understood me, internet, I would probably not even give a fuck about privacy. But you are all building these profiles wrong.

You don't understand that I might be interested in juggling tricks today, tomorrow it might be all about crocheting a wool sweater for my penis, and the day after that I'm curious how many corpses it would take to fill up an olympic swimming pool.

NO I'M NOT ACTUALLY INTERESTED IN THAT QUORA, STOP SENDING ME RECOMMENDATION EMAILS ON HIDING MURDER VICTIMS, MY BOSS WILL THINK I'M WEIRD.

Yeah of course I could pulls some plugs, anonymize the shit out of my online life. I respect those who manage to just say "Fuck you Google, I'm sick of your shit, I'm going cold turkey".

But these platforms are feeding us heroin-laced candy.

All your coworkers friends and family with their oled-lit zombiefaces, staring at tiny screens, all absent-mindedly grasping your ankles whispering "aww take one more hit with us, check out this funny youtube clip, let me send it to you on whatsapp.... what you don't have whatsapp? You deleted your facebook? don't you love grandma anymore? Why do you hate your family?"

Before you know it, you watched ten episodes about cultivating cactuses, have a year subscription to brilliant, skillshare, squarespace and 3 different organic foodboxes are delivered to your door, Netflix is spamming you about a cupcake baking show, and you're thinking about same-day delivery for a baseball bat so you can just beat the crap out of every pretty glass display you see.

I want to break up with you, Internet.

I love you, but I hate you.

Since you passed 2.0, you have grown into a manipulative bitch.

I just don't know if I'm strong enough. It's all "let's just be friends" with you, but I know you'll be trying to reel me back in.

Before I know it, you're feeding me cookies once again, and I'll end up balls deep with your trackers stuck to my dick.

I once had a manager who would, at every stand up, ask everyone if there was a better way to solve their problem. She did this even if the team had already decided on a solution or even if there was no problem at all. She wouldn't let us continue the stand up until we had proposed a new 'solution' that was close to her 'suggestions'.

Some of my favorite suggestions were: "Are you doing everything you can to not make it too 'spiffy' ?". If you said yes the follow up was always: "can you tell me how?"

Then when you said you hit a bit of a bump yesterday due to something unexpected she always demanded that you pair programmed today. Now I don't have anything against pair programming, I even think it's useful from time to time, but being forced to sit next to someone or have someone sit next to me every time someone encountered something unexpected annoyed the shit out of me. Needless to say no one had any problems to speak of during stand ups after a while.

Whenever I was sparring with one of my colleagues she would always join in and start proposing 'solutions' about technical problems she didn't even understand. Again, she wouldn't back down until we had accepted her 'solution'. We would then go to a different room and hope she wouldn't find us there.

This went on for months, until several people had disagreed with her so much that it ended in shouting matches.

It still makes me angry when I think of one person crippling a team that much. I took my issues to her, to HR and finally to the CEO directly, but no one did anything about it.

Finally one of my colleagues decided to quit. After he handed in his two weeks notice our manager came to me and asked if she could talk to me in private.

She told me that she didn't understand why our colleague quit and she thought everything was going great. This was after just about everyone had told her that they hated how she acted and that if she wouldn't stop they'd quit. I had told her that myself twice.

She then proceeded to tell me that I was the most valuable employee and that the company couldn't go on without me. As a gesture of their appreciation for my invaluable effort, she was so generous to offer a salary increase of 50 euro, before taxes.

I laughed, said no and handed in my two week notice the next morning.

I vowed never to work with fucktards again, and I haven't since.

My thoughts when my uncle was introducing me to one of his friends.
(M = me, U = uncle, F = Uncle's friend)

U : Meet M, he is a software developer, he works at * blah *.

M (Internally): That is a very reasonable introduction.

U : * Continues speaking. *

M (Internally): No, staph! It was good enough. Don't go any further.

U : He does * blah blah *

M (Internally): That's not even remotely related to what I do.

U : If you have any tech related problems, he is your guy.

M (Internally): You should have kept shut.

U : If your phone slows down, he can fix it.

M (Internally): Why would you even say that !?

U : He can fix all you printer issues.

M (Internally): Excuse me. What. The. Fuck!?

U : You should definitely consult him before purchasing any tech.

M (Internally): That's it. I give up. There is no hope left.

F : * Gestures U to clam down. *
F : * Nods at M in a very assuring manner. As if he were saying, 'chill bro! Its all cool, I understand.' *

M (Internally): Hold on. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there is some hope left.

F : So, tell me, how good are you with excel formulas?

M (Internally): * Dies *

Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

Story of my most useless meeting?

Too many to mention. Here's one. Years ago a new HR associate was specifically hired to better engage the workforce. About once a week, she conducted about an hour to two hour meetings which consisted of every 'touchy-feely' idea you could think of. I swear any day I was going to walk into a meeting and do the "fall back into your partner" trust exercises.

One particular meeting, 'Betty' engaged us with the topic of what keeps us motivated, and I was a little more annoyed than usual because I was behind on a system critical project and these meetings were mandatory.

User1: "Knowing I make customer satisfaction my number one priority."
User2: "The strong sense of accomplishment I feel by doing my best"
Me: "Money"
<you could almost hear Betty's gasp>
Betty: "Oh, no, money shouldn't be the motivator. Money is like icing on the cake. Tell us what keeps you happy and engaged."
<other users nod their heads in engagement>
Me: "Again, money."
User3: "I can't...ugh..I don't believe..oh..why would you say that? I think being part of such a great team is payment enough."
<more nodding of heads>
Me: "Do you work for free? I don't. None of us do. Would any of you keep doing your jobs here if you weren't getting paid?"
Betty: "That is really not the point of this meeting."
Me: "Sure it is. I'll bet if Order Taking starting providing bonuses for positive after-call surveys, employee satisfaction would go through the roof. Anyone else like that idea?"
Betty: "Your attitude isn't helping this discussion. Lets move on."
Me: "Lets not. In 20?? the Gartner group performed a study where they 'discovered' the primary motivator for employees was money. You want employees to perform better, you pay them. It is really that simple."
<I could see the looks of "Its OK to speak my mind?" and others wanting to speak up>
Betty: "Moving on. Lets go over the company core values again and discuss how they enrich our lives at work and at home."

I kept quiet for the rest of the meeting.

The poop hit the fan, and my boss pulls me into a conference room
Boss: "Betty is really pissed at you. She went directly to the VP of HR"
Me: "Good. Does this mean I don't have to attend the enrichment meetings?"
Boss: "Yea, that was her idea of punishment. Lucky bastard."

The Orange Juice Saga ....

I've just come off one of the stupidest calls ever.

Firstly, I am not in tech support, I'm a software developer - read the below with this in mind.

My client called up to say the system I created as been compromised. When he attempts to login, he is logged off his Windows machine.

He'd also apparently taken his PC to ***insert large UK computer superstore here***, who took £100 plus to look at the machine and conclude his needs to buy a new PC.

I remoted into his computer to see WTF was going on.

As he described, visiting my login form did log you out. In fact, whenever you pressed the "L" key you were logged out. Press the "M" key, all windows were minimized. Basically, all Windows hotkeys appeared to be active, without the need to press the Windows key.

Whilst connected to his PC I spent a good 30 minutes checking keyboard settings and came up short.

After asking all the normal questions (has anything changed on your PC, have you installed stuff lately etc.) without any useful answers I got nothing.

I then came across an article stating several presses of the Windows in quick succession will solve the issue.

I got the client to try this, pressed the "L" key (which would have logged me off previously) and the issue was resolved.

Basically, the Windows key was "stuck", which oddly makes your PC kind of useless.

I asked the client if they'd split anything on the keyword whilst working. His exact word were simply lol:

"Oh yer, yesterday, I was trying to drink a glass of orange quickly and split some in the corner of keyboard. I did clean it up quickly though".

Yep, the issue was due to the client spilling orange juice on their keyboard , which in turn made the Windows key stick.

Disaster averted.

A call that started with the client stating I made a system that was easily compromised (i.e. my fault), morphed into a sorry saga of cold drinks.

The client did ask why the ***superstore name*** charged him money for that and recommended a new machine. That is a good question and demonstrated some the questionable tech support practices we see nowadays, even at very large stores.

To be fair to the client, he told me to bill him for half a days work as it was his own fault.

When I'm able to stop myself involuntarily face palming, I'm off for a swim to unwind :)

Wrote my friend Sam a letter when I was still working in support. I think it still holds up today.

---

Dear Sam,

I understand that you will join us in our overseas office. Congratulations on landing that job. It’s good steady work. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years.

Your still young so maybe I can give you some little wisdom that will help you in your working years to come.

Let me begin by shedding some light on phone calls.

I try. I really do try Sam. But it is getting so hard for me to hold back the rage that builds up during certain phone calls. Especially the ‘Sorry, I just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’ ones.

Those are the times that I have no access to what they see. I’ve no team-viewer, can not take over that screen in any other way. And why-oh-why can I not take over that terminal session dear Sam? It’s because the caller can not double-click an icon or find a terminal session number.

And what is the reason for this? Because they ‘just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’. This is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Beware of these callers Sam.

There is nothing so nerve-wrecking then finding yourself at the mercy of people describing Internet Explorer (do not even get me started) as ‘the big ‘E’, if they use Chrome for their webmail then they most likely will say ‘Mail’ if they mean Chrome. There is no logic Sam. That is just the way these people work.

They will suck all enjoyment out of your work. They will make you want to hunt them down in dark office hallways and show them your tears Sam. Because cry you will.

Sure, I understand that not everyone can be tech savvy. Why, if everyone would be, where would that leave us? No. I love the technologically challenged. They put the fiber in my internet. They make me LOL for real. After the initial anger subsides anyway.

But just below that well-willing folk, on the other side of that border… there they dwell: Management.

Nice cars, suits and iphones Sam. First thing a new manager will require is a brand spanking new business-card. It will hold his/her new title. Then an iphone or overpriced android model will follow suit.

Then they will barge into your office, holding it like it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.

Any manager will automatically assume that you will drop anything you are doing at the present moment to acknowledge the presence of greatness. Failing to do so will result in awkward yet fulfilling situations. I recommend that you do not take your hands of the keyboard and give only the slightest of nods after 5 minutes of complete silence and glaring.

Well… you feel the glare. You do not glare yourself. You do not break eye-contact with the monitor. It does not even matter if you are typing for real or not. I once clicked away happily for 5 minutes. I just typed ‘he is still there’ over and over again. Do not break down Sam. This moment will decide your relationship with this individual.

After the nod there will be a flood of words aimed in your general direction. You can disregard anything that is said. It boils down to ‘can not operate device’.

You then take the device from this person and put it next to you on your desk. You’ll ask the name of this simpleton, write it down on a sticky-note, slap that on the phone. Then you’ll write a random date in the not so near future on another sticky and hand that to the bewildered person in front of you.

It will usually utter some incoherent words about ‘needing, time or but’ (I find that ‘but’is a word they like. They tend to use it three or four times consecutive before you usher them through the door).

Now you’ve won Sam. Well… not really. But it will feel good, I can guarantee that.

This must do for now. A new suit is glaring at me for the last five minutes.

Felt good to do something productive with this time.

Take care,

Baltasar

P.s. I just noticed that there is some foam around his mouth. So if you encounter this, don’t worry: it seems to be perfectly normal.

To all young freelancers in low-income countries: I want to share my experience, of 6 years working for a piss-poor country, and 6 years working in freelance, and then emigrating. Here's what you should watch out for, and what to expect:

My first salary was barely 1.5$ per hour. I lived in a piss-poor country that taught me a lot (like why it's piss-poor).
The main thing to note when you're a developer in such a country, is that you're being fucked. Your employer might scream at you and tell you how bad you are, while barely paying you. That is you ... being ... fucked. Gain some confidence with the help of friends and family, and a great effort from yourself, look at what freelance gigs you can find, and ditch anything related to jobs in your country.

Being a somewhat able developer, but with modest experience, I started my freelance gigs for 5$ per hour. Because I was lazy, and freelance gigs weren't exactly being thrown at me, I was making 100$ per week, AFTER the companies I worked for appreciated what I did and offered themselves to up my pay to 12$ per hour. Yep. I was lazy. You will likely get lazy in freelance too, so be prepared for this.

My luck changed when one of my clients became a full-time employer, at 15$ per hour, with a well organized team where I actually worked for 40 hours per week (I had already amassed 8 years of experience...). For people in first world countries that will seem laughable, but in my country I was king of the hill, getting paid more than government CEOs that ended up in the news as the "most well paid".

That was the top of the pyramid for international indie freelance, as I would later find out.
I didn't do stuff that was very difficult. In fact, I felt like my abilities were rotting while I worked there. I had to change something. So I started looking for better offers. I contacted many companies that were looking for a senior developer, and the interviews went well, and all was fine, except for my salary demands. I was asking for 25$ per hour. Nobody was willing to pay more than 15$ per hour. That's because of my competition - tons of developers in cheap-to-live countries that had the same, or more to offer, for the same rates. Globalization.

So I moved to Germany. As soon as I was legally able to work, I was hunted down by everybody. I was told that it takes a month to pass the whole hiring process in Germany. My experience demonstrated that 2-5 days is enough to get a signed contract with "Please start ASAP".
There is freelance in Germany as well. And in the US. And everywhere else. A "special" kind of freelance, where you have to reside locally. The rates that this freelance goes for is much, much higher than international freelance. I'd say that 100€ per hour is ok-ish. Some people (newbies, or foreigners who don't speak the language well) get less, around 60 or so. Smart experienced locals get around 150-200 or even more.

It's all there. Companies want good developers to solve their business problems with IT solutions, and they'll beg you to take their money if you can deliver that.

So code!
Learn!
Accummulate experience!
Screw the scumbags that screw you for 1-2$ per hour!
Anyone able to write something more than "Hello World!" deserves more.

Do the climb! There's literally room for everybody up there! There is so much to do, that I feel like there will never be too many developers.

Thank you for bearing with my long story. I hope it will help you make it shorter and more pleasant for you.

It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

So today my middle company put a meeting with the new HR.

Meeting subject: you can't poach inside the company.

Context: I resigned, and I'll be taking with me 3 profiles.

HR: If you do take them, we'll take you to court.

Me: Why?

HR: It's poaching and by contract, you can't.

Me: You can show which clause?

HR: That's not the problem.

Me: Also in France, you need to notify the employee as you are denying his right to get a job. And pay him for that.

HR: What? That's none sense! Stop talking and listen.

Me: Ok

HR: We'll sue you and crush you. You'll have so much legal problem that you...

Me: I'll just start recording on my phone, so you say that you accept it and continue your intimidation rant.

HR: What? No!! Stop that.

Me: *stop it* Would you rather have my lawyer with us? Because we'll need to reschedule the meeting.

HR: If you continue that way, we'll tarnish your name and no company will hire you.

Me: You really aren't familiar with IT, right? Because I could delete ALL production. No system work. The BCP will kick in. You will lose one or two days. Then make an article of it, showing what kind of process or security should have been implemented. And I will still get a high pay job!!

HR: You know what? Get out! If you want to go to war, your problem.

Me: Ok, so you'll be getting news from my lawyer by mail.

HR: what?

Me: Yeah, that harassment. And my lawyer will get in touch. And I might also post on LinkedIn. And talk about it in the next events I'm invited.

HR: that's, that's...

Me: freedom of speech. Don't worry I'll write it so it's only viewed as my opinion. Have a nice day.

Two hours later my friend, lawyer, send them a mail and email.

Three hours later the COO calls me. Saying that HR was out of line and that it'll no occur again. It was an error and I should be forgiving.

So now all discussion with HR must be held with my attorney :). And middle company pay for it.

After months of tedious research, I finally feel like I understand machine learning.

All of my programmer buddies are in envy, but I keep trying to explain that what I finally get is that it's not as hard as it's presented to be.

I feel like a lot of the terminology in machine learning is really pretentious and unnecessary, and just keeps new people from the field.

For example: I could say: "Yeah, I'm training a classification model with two input neurons, a hidden activation layer, and an output neuron", and you might think I was hot shit. But that just gets translated into "I'm putting in two inputs, sorting them, and outputting one thing".

I feel like if there was a plain language guide to machine learning, the field would be a lot more attractive to a lot more people. I know that's why it was hard for me to get in. Maybe I'll write one.

!dev
Last week I watched a DIY video where at the end the guy dumped detergent water on the grass. I kindly commented it's a €150 fine. Their response was on the lines of "Oh yeah, Mr Proper? And what would you say if I told you I spray my whole garden with soap to get rid of weeds, huh?".

Well, you dumb fuck, I don't care what you do, I wasn't attacking you, I was being *nice* and warned you about the fucking fine that you're going to fucking pay because your channel name is your first and last name and your video shows the street and the house number but whatever.

Today I couldn't log into my YouTube account. Why was that, you might ask? Well, because the dumb fuck paid the fucking fine and assumed I was the one that ratted, so he made a video about it and his dumb fuck audience falsely reported all of my videos for child abuse and promoting terrorism.

I only upload unboxing videos that debunk scummy "deals". 🤦‍♂️

"Fuck JavaScript, its such a shitty language" seems to be quite a common rant today. It seems as if JS is actually getting more hate than PHP, which is certainly odd, considering the stereotype.

So, as someone who has spent a lot of time in JS and a lot of time elsewhere, here are my views. Please, discuss your opinions with me as well. I am genuinely interested in an intelligent conversation about this topic.

So here's my background: learned HTML/CSS/JS in that order when I was 12 because I liked computers. I was pretty shitty at JS until U was at least 15, but you get the point, Ive had it sploshing about in my brain for a while.

Now, JS certainly has its quirks, no doubt, but theres nothing about the language itself that I would say makes it shitty. Its a very easy leanguage to use, but isn't overdeveloped like VB.net (Or, as I like to call it, TheresAFunctionForThat)

Most of the hate is centered around JS being used for a very broad range of systems. I doubt JS would be in the rant feed so often if it were to stay in its native ecosystem of web browsers. JS can be used in server backend, web frontent, desktop and mobile applications, and even in some system services (Although this isn't very popular as of yet). People seem to be terrified that one very easy to learn language can go so far. And, oh god, its interpreted... How can a system app run off an interpreted language? That's absurd.

My opinion on JSEverything is that it's progress. Thats what we're all about, right? The technologies already in place are unthreatened by JS, it isn't a gamechanger. The only thing JS integration is doing is making tedius and simple tasks easier. Big companies with large systems aren't going to jump ship and migrate to JS. A startup, however, could save a fucking ton of development time by using a JS framework, however. I want to live in a world where startups can become the next Google, because technology will stagnate when youre trying to protect your fortune, (Look at Apple for fucks sake) but innovation is born of small people with big ideas.

I have a feeling the hate for JS is coming from fear of abandoning what you're already doing. You don't have to do that. JS is only another option (And a very good one, which is why it's becoming so popular).

As for my personal opinion from my experiences... I've left this part til the end on purpose. I love programming and learning and creating, so I've never hated a lamguage, really. It all depends on what I want to do. In the times i've played arpund with JS, I've loved it. Very very easy. The idea of having it on both ends of web development makes a lot of sense too, no conversion, just direct communication. I would imagine this really helps with speed, as well. I wouldn't use it in a complicated system, though. Small things, medium size projects: perfect. Running a bank? No.

So what do you think about this JSUniverse?

"Hey, about that matter from yesterday..."
"Yes, what about that?"
"We need to talk about that again! How often do you trigger that system?"
"Once."
"You sure?"
"Yes, but i can check it, if you like."
*find references*
"See, only once."
"Can it happen at a random point later one?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes"
"Can you check it?"
"Okay."
*shows code"
"Look here, as you can see, it will not happen at other times."
"Do you have an idea why it could happen anyway?"
"Maybe that system does the action without my software telling it to do so, wasn't that specified that way?"
"Yes, but it normally does that roughly 10 seconds after you give the command the first time, so we thought maybe you could say what makes it do the action at other points maybe."
"Did you check that systems sourcecode?"
"No not yet. But did that happen with the older version?"
"No. But we didn't try."
"Did you change something between the versions?"
"Yes, the new feature."
"Could that make a change in behaviour?"
"I don't see how."
"Can you remove that feature for test?"
"We can take the old version."
"No, we need the new version, but without the feature you added."
"That IS the old version, there is no other difference!"
"Are you sure?"
"Would you like to see it in source control?"
"No, ~ okay. What do you think causes the problem?"
"I haven't had any new ideas since we talked yesterday."
"Okay. Mhhh,...okay. Lets talk again later."

YES SURE! BRING IT ON! I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO THAT! PLEASE COME BY OR CALL ME AGAIN! AND BRING THE BOSS WITH YOU, TO SHOW HOW SERIOUS THE MATTER IS! LET ME TELL HIM THE STUFF I TOLD SEVEN TIMES LAST WEEK!

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

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

Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.

I just need to get something off my heart. The past two years, I worked for the same ISP in Germany, but now as a devops engineer. Well, popo hit the fan really quick lately..

First a good friend, team lead for one of five areas in Germany, quit his job. He was one of the nicest persons I knew, and he believed that all that five areas should work together and share dev resources. Thats why I work mostly in other areas as developer.

Shortly after, his deputy quit as well. I heard that this specific area, the management were a bunch of dicks, but wow!

A short while later, I learnd the hard truth, why those two good friends quit, and that brings me to this story. In a meeting I readied myself up to present my new plattform - a social room - to management. I got a lot of positive feedback from others and we thaught managment would approve of the project. But nope. "We can buy from external, we dont need to program ourselfs. In fact lets stop spending money on internal programming, we should outsource everything!"

I was baffeld... Wtf did i just witness? My team lead didn't say anything, and afterwards I didn't dare to question it, but I told most of my close dev friends and we all realizied, that the rumors were true... We will be shifting into project managment.

At this point, I realized that I wasnt having it, and made a linkedIn account, not because I wanted to switch jobs, but because, meh you never know.

One week ago, one of my bestest buddies said he will quit and join his team lead that left eariler this year, I was heartbroken. Me and our other buddy are devestated, because now we have to do everything he had done. Management didn't listen as we told them that nobody can maintain his code. I have so many projects, I can bearly keep up with them. Now I got a lead role for creating the server infrastucture for a huge project my buddy was working on. Only as specialist and not PM, but his Team Lead thinks I am replacing him!

Last week I got a message on LinkedIn, a consulting firm reached out to me to aquire me as a new consultant or devops engineer. They look great, only less vacation (26 instead of 30 days), 40h shifts instead of 38h and only slightly more base payment. I currently receive about 53.000€ a year, the new firm only grants up to 60.000€ a year for anyone. Otherwise, they look great.

With all my buddies quitting around me, work getting more while time developing decreasing, I don't know what the right thing to do is... There is no way I can get a payment increase in my current position. I always say "my workplace is save, but my work isnt". I don't want to do project managment.

Today I have a meeting with my team lead, she is really nice btw. This is an annual meeting where we discuss my future in the company etc. Shortly after, I have a meeting with the new firm to discuss a bunch of questions I have.

I dont know what to do...

Edit: I missed you, devrant

Fuck my life...

Okay, so I’m working on a web app with a small group... the app is basically a lead generator for new business in another country. We just need contact details cause they’re a fucker to buy.

Step 1: prototype to the investors, working with the ceo to make this thing look shiny AF.

Goes well as fuck.

CEO: “when can we get this out?”

Me: “it’s basically done mate, get your guys to look at it and we can talk about marketing”

Que a shower of 10 or so bellends with senior in their title going into a room and coming out with:

Bellends: “so on this page we want the user to confirm and accept the contract”

Me: “cool, makes some sense, that’s what it’s already doing.”

Bellends: “afterwards we want to show them the price and have them put in their banking details.”

Me: “Wait, you what when?”

Bellends: “Yeah, well Jenny says we should have as few clicks as possible to get to the final stage and have the customer accept.”

Me: “Jenny’s on fucking crack, moving the contract formation phase to after the contract acceptance stage is not an option”

Bellends: “Oh it’s okay, Andy in legal said that would be okay”

Me: “Andy’s a fucking moron, tell him that online contract formation laws were updated 2014/2015 and you can’t do that anymore”

Bellends: “No, andy’s legal, surely he knows”

Bellends: “We want all of this above the fold”

Me: “OH FUCKING SUCK A DICK YOU ABSOLUTE BAND OF FUCKWADS... which one of you, which one hasn’t looked at a website this millennia!?”

Needless to say I ignored all their shit, got the lead generator out and told the CEO those ten people are certifiably fucking useless.

Bonus round; recent, but “it has to be on internal infrastructure”

“Why? It’s a mobile app sending rest calls to a third party saas.”

“It just has to, we have this thing called the private cloud and w”

“Wait... you what son, priv 🤦🏼‍♂️ private what mate?”

“Private cloud”

“You... you mean a server rack?”

“Nah we spent £2mn on it, it’s brilliant”

“Hahahaha you fucking dick, you blew £2mn on server infra with fuckall to put on it!?”

“No, no it’s the private cloud”

“Fucking idiot, aye son, where’s the fucking bean stalk you prick!?”

“It has to go on internal infr”

“Shut up, that won’t work”

So as quite some people know on here, I am strongly against closed source software and have a very strong distrust in it as well.
So next to some principles (and believes etc etc etc) there is one specifc 'event' which triggered the distrust in CSS (No not Cascading Style sheet, I mean Closed Source Software :P). So hereby the story about what happened.

I think it was about 5 years ago when a guy joined my programming class (I wasn't in uni although I studied but for the sake of clarity, lets just call it uni for now (also, that makes me feel smarter so why the fuck not!)) in uni. He knew a shitload about programming for his age but he was convinced that he was always right. (that aside)
Anyways, at some point we had to work in groups on this project (groups for specific tasks) and he chose (he loved it, we hated it, he had the final say) Trello for 'project management'. He gave everyone (I was running Windows for a little bit at that moment because the project was in C# and the Snowden leaks had not arrived yet so I was not extremely uncomfortable with using Windows, just a lot) this addon program thingy he created for Trello which would make usage easier. I asked if it was open source, he replied with 'No, because this is my project.' and although I did understand that entirely, I didn't feel comfy using it because of it's closed source nature. Everyone declared me paranoid and he was annoyed as hell but I just kept refusing to use it and just used the web interface.

*skips to 2 years later*

I met that guy again at the train station at a random day! Had the usual 'how are you and what's up after a few years' talk with him and then he told me something that changed my view on closed source software for most probably the rest of my life.

"Hey by the way, do you remember that project of a few years back where you didn't want to use my software because of your 'closed-sourceness paranoia'? I just wanted to say that I actually had some kind of backdooring feature build in which (I am not going to say what) allowed me to (although I didn't use it) look at/do certain things with the 'infected' computers. I really wanted to say that I find it funny how you, the only one who didn't give in to my/the peer pressure, were the only one who wasn't affected by my 'backdoor' at that moment! Also your standards towards the use of closed source software probably played a big part probably. I find that pretty cool actually!"

Although I cannot confirm what he said, he was exactly the type of guy who would do this IMO (and not only IMO I think).

So yeah, that's one of the reasons AND the story behind a big part of why I don't trust closed source software :).

!!privacy
!!political

I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.

I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).

I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.

The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)

Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)

Like, scary?

And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)

So I won't be using Venmo. ever.

I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"

I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.

He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."

but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.

I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."

His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."

Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.

and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)

But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.

Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.

He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.

I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*

I had to open the desktop app to write this because I could never write a rant this long on the app.

This will be a well-informed rebuttal to the "arrays start at 1 in Lua" complaint. If you have ever said or thought that, I guarantee you will learn a lot from this rant and probably enjoy it quite a bit as well.

Just a tiny bit of background information on me: I have a very intimate understanding of Lua and its c API. I have used this language for years and love it dearly.

[START RANT]

"arrays start at 1 in Lua" is factually incorrect because Lua does not have arrays. From their documentation, section 11.1 ("Arrays"), "We implement arrays in Lua simply by indexing tables with integers."

From chapter 2 of the Lua docs, we know there are only 8 types of data in Lua: nil, boolean, number, string, userdata, function, thread, and table

The only unfamiliar thing here might be userdata. "A userdatum offers a raw memory area with no predefined operations in Lua" (section 26.1). Essentially, it's for the API to interact with Lua scripts. The point is, this isn't a fancy term for array.

The misinformation comes from the table type. Let's first explore, at a low level, what an array is. An array, in programming, is a collection of data items all in a line in memory (The OS may not actually put them in a line, but they act as if they are). In most syntaxes, you access an array element similar to:

array[index]

Let's look at c, so we have some solid reference. "array" would be the name of the array, but what it really does is keep track of the starting location in memory of the array. Memory in computers acts like a number. In a very basic sense, the first sector of your RAM is memory location (referred to as an address) 0. "array" would be, for example, address 543745. This is where your data starts. Arrays can only be made up of one type, this is so that each element in that array is EXACTLY the same size. So, this is how indexing an array works. If you know where your array starts, and you know how large each element is, you can find the 6th element by starting at the start of they array and adding 6 times the size of the data in that array.

Tables are incredibly different. The elements of a table are NOT in a line in memory; they're all over the place depending on when you created them (and a lot of other things). Therefore, an array-style index is useless, because you cannot apply the above formula. In the case of a table, you need to perform a lookup: search through all of the elements in the table to find the right one. In Lua, you can do:

a = {1, 5, 9};
a["hello_world"] = "whatever";

a is a table with the length of 4 (the 4th element is "hello_world" with value "whatever"), but a[4] is nil because even though there are 4 items in the table, it looks for something "named" 4, not the 4th element of the table.

This is the difference between indexing and lookups. But you may say,

"Algo! If I do this:

a = {"first", "second", "third"};
print(a[1]);

...then "first" appears in my console!"

Yes, that's correct, in terms of computer science. Lua, because it is a nice language, makes keys in tables optional by automatically giving them an integer value key. This starts at 1. Why? Lets look at that formula for arrays again:

Given array "arr", size of data type "sz", and index "i", find the desired element ("el"):

el = arr + (sz * i)

This NEEDS to start at 0 and not 1 because otherwise, "sz" would always be added to the start address of the array and the first element would ALWAYS be skipped. But in tables, this is not the case, because tables do not have a defined data type size, and this formula is never used. This is why actual arrays are incredibly performant no matter the size, and the larger a table gets, the slower it is.

That felt good to get off my chest. Yes, Lua could start the auto-key at 0, but that might confuse people into thinking tables are arrays... well, I guess there's no avoiding that either way.

> In office for first time in awhile
> Run into group of 4 people I don’t recognize in far cubicle corning laughing in hushed voices eating of an impressive spread of food
> See me and immediately look at each other with panicked expressions
> Confused, I put my hands up to indicate I come in peace
> They relax a little and say they thought I was from HR since they didn’t recognize me
> Ask why HR seeing them would be such a big deal
> They say their potluck is not “sanctioned”
> …?

So apparently HR just could resist ruining one of the only good things about coming into the office and one of the coolest things about the company’s culture. At least once a month there would be a giant potluck where everyone would bring some home cooked dish and share it. I can’t tell you how amazing these are in Canada, 50+ plates of authentic food from all over the world.

Unfortunately HR didn’t agree as 1. They didn’t cook so felt bad taking food. 2. Nobody asked them permission to put on these events they just happened organically. 3. Some people were bringing in food that they felt was culturally inappropriate (ie. caucasian guy bringing in homemade sushi).

HR recently banned all “unsanctioned” potlucks and all future potlucks needed to be approved through them with the following stipulations. 1. You could participate without bringing something by donating to HR $10 2. If you brought something you still had to give HR $10. 3. Things you brought in had to be approved by HR

Naturally the first and only potluck under these rules only 4 people brought something in as many couldn’t get their dishes approved because HR didn’t like what they were planning to bring (started out as being because culture and turned into HR just being picky), most just brought $10 so there wasn’t enough food to go around and so after HR took a giant group photo to post on the company’s social media accounts to show off how good the company’s culture is most everyone had to go out for lunch. HR sent out an email later that day exclaiming what a huge success for charity and the company brand the potluck was and they can’t wait for the next one. (I have the HR communications email marked as spam so I never saw the email). Nobody ever organized a sanctioned potluck after that.

However people still missed cooking and sharing their favourite recipes with one another so potlucks still occur but they are now very small, secret, invite-only, hush-hush affairs.

…What in the ever loving fuck

A fanfic based on devRant-chan. The character was created by @caramelCase and a drawing by @ichijou.

This is freestyle. I'll think of an image of a scene and go with the flow. I won't remove my fingers from the keyboard and I won't edit or change anything. That's how I come up with my best ideas.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Notes:

B/N = Boss' name (I was too lazy to think of one.)

Anything in between astericks is in italics.
Ex.) *this is in italics.*

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was an early January morning when devRant-chan was situated in her desk, typing away on her laptop. She was working on a Python script for her barbaric client when she could've been out with friends. Oddly enough, her Sunday was surged with tranquility.

Normally, Sunday is when her irksome boss barks orders at her on the phone.

"This is wrong!"

"What is this?"

"Change it!"

devRant-chan resented her boss but loved her job. After all, "you can't force yourself to like everyone," was something her elder brother would tell her.

She released a slight chuckle, the one she would only display at the thought of her brother.

Her musings were interrupted when a concerning thought crawled into her mind like an undesirable intruder.

Why hasn't her boss called to complain yet? It's not that she enjoyed his complaining, which she didn't. She simply found it odd, since he's done this every Sunday morning, since she was a junior developer.

Unless he found someone else to complain to? In that case, good riddance!

But still, it wasn't a euphoric feeling to be replaced. She was already accustomed to his Sunday morning calls that it feels almost lonely not to receive them.

She should call him... Just in case some situation—or—problem—has emerged.

She dialed his number, waiting patiently for a reply.

"Hello," said her boss.

"Ah, hello," said devRant-chan. "I called, wondering—"

"You've reached the voicemail of B/N, please leave a message after the beep."

"Damn..." mumbled devRant-chan with a sharp exhale. "I always fall for that."

Why didn't her boss answer the phone? It was odd of him, considering he's always answered her calls.

She was about to dial her coworker when she received an email, which stimulated her attention. The subject of the email read:

*Important. Please read.*

She opened the email. It was her boss. The email read:

*Hello.*

*In case you aren't aware, I had quit my job, due to the stress. I've left the manager in charge. Starting tomorrow, he will be your new boss.*

*-B/N*

Before she could rejoice in excitement, she detected a strange change of voice, emitting from the email. Did her boss really write this?

That's when she spotted something. The word "tomorrow."

Her boss didn't write this.

He would never use words such as "tomorrow," or "today." He would use time instead. If this was her boss, he would say "in 24 hours."

She checked the IP of the email. Oddly enough, it was her boss' IP.

Still, the pieces didn't fit the puzzle. Her boss didn't complain, answer her call, or use his style of speaking in the email.

Something happened to him and she knows it. Whatever it is, has something to do with the manager, and she was determined to figure it out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This was just a quick random fanfic, and I'm not sure if I'll continue it. As I said, I didn't plan anything, since it's freestyle. I might or might not continue it, so I'll think it over.

Overheard a phone call between the Senior Network Engineer and a contracted Printer-company at 9am this morning. Photocopier was giving a 'functional error' message on-screen and not printing;

N.E:
I logged this call last
Thursday afternoon. Thats 1.5 days of the photocopier not working on our busiest site! Where's the engineer??
.... yes, that's the error message.
Yes, i can log into it, you should have the IP address from the call.
Yes, it's obviously pinging too.
Yes.... we've power-cycled the printer multiple times...
yes, tried that too...
yes, I've unplugged the network cable as well... left it for 15 minutes.
... sorry. What?
What did you say?
Are you f***ing kidding me?
Would you also like me to rub the side of the f***ing machine, and say a prayer while I'm at it??
*takes a deep breath*
Fine, I'll do that but when it doesn't work, i want someone out on the site before lunchtime today!
*slams phone down angrily*

N.E to me as he stomps out of the office;
He wants me to get the user to unplug the network cable and do a power cycle. How the f**k is that going to help? Idiots! Don't know why we have a contract with them, i could do a better job!!!

*comes back into office 5 minutes later*

Me: did it fix it?
NE: yeah. Damn.
*leaves room again to make apologetic phonecall*

Man, I think we've all gotten way too many of these.

Normally most interactions that I have are through email. Eventually some would try to contact me via phone. These are some:

"Hey! We are calling you from <whatever company name> solutions! (most of them always seem to end on solutions or some shit like that) concerning the Ruby on Rails senior dev opportunity we were talking about via email"
<niceties, how are you doing, similar shit goes here...eventually>

So tell us! how good/comfortable would you say you are with C++?"

Me: I have never done anything serious with c++ and did just use it at school, but because I am not a professional in it I did not list it in my CV, what does it have to do with Rails?

Them: "Oh the applications of this position must be ready to take in additional duties which sometimes happen to be C or C++"

Me: Well that was not anywhere in the offer you sent, it specifically requested a full stack Rails developer that could work with 3 different frontend stacks already and like 4 different databases plus bla bla bla, I did not see c++ anywhere in it. Matter of fact I find it funny, one of the things that I was curious about was the salary, for what you are asking and specifically in the city in which you are asking it for 75k is way too low, you are seriously expecting a senior level rails dev to do all that AND take additional duties with c++? cpp could mean a billion different things"

Them: "well this is a big opportunity that will increase your level to senior position"

Me: the add ALREADY asks for a senior position, why are you making it sound that I will get build towards that level if you are already off the bat asking for seniors only to begin with?

Them: You are not getting it, it is an opportunity to grow into a senior, applicants right now are junior to mid-level

ME: You are all not making any sense, please don't contact me again.

=======

Them: We are looking for someone with 15 years experience with Swift development for mobile and web

Me: What is up with your people not making these requirements in paper? if I knew from the beginning that you people think that Swift is 15 years old I would have never agreed to this "interview"

Them: If you are not interested in that then might we offer this one for someone with 10 years experience as a full stack TypeScript developer.

Me: No, again, check your dates, this is insulting.

===

* For another Rails position

Them: How good are you with Ruby on Rails in terms of Python?

Me: excuse me? Python has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.

Her (recruiter was a woman) * with a tone of superiority: I have it here that Python is the primary technology that accompanies Rails development.

Me (thinking this was a joke) : What do you think the RUBY part of Ruby on Rails is for? and what does "accompanies Rails development" even means?

Her: Well if you are not interested in using Rails with Python then maybe you can tell us about your experience in using Javascript as the main scripting platform for Rails.

Me: This is a joke, goodbye.

====

To be fair this was years ago when I still didn't know better and test the recruiters during the email part of being contacted. Now a days I feel sorry for everyone since I just say no without even bothering. This is a meme all on itself which no one has ever bothered to review and correct in years for now. I don't know why recruiters don't google themselves to see what people think of their "profession" in order to become better.

I've even had the Java/Javascript stupidity thrown at me by a local company. For that one it was someone from their very same HR department doing the rectuiter, their shop foreman was a friend of the family, did him the service of calling him to let him know that his HR was never going to land the kind of developer they were looking for with the retarded questions they had and sent him a detailed email concerning the correct information they needed for their JAVAscript job which they kept confusing with Java (for some reason in the context of Spring, they literally wanted nothing with Spring, they wanted some junior to do animations and shit like that on their company's website, which was in php, Java was nowhere in this equation)

I think people in web development get the short end of the stick when it comes to retarded recruiters more than anywhere else.

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

Sadly to say, but devrant is slowly moving away from dev part of its name, even rant part.

More I see posts about this tech sucks vs that tech sucks. That being annoying, would be fine, not for me, but fine.

The worse part are the memes. Repost memes, not funny, though, maybe funny to some, still no effort reposts.

Even worse are posts that have nothing to do with dev. Like recent post about soldiers and gay people (maybe you saw it). Why the hell post it here?

Going down are the ++ beggers, sadly I see even more of them.

Yes I understand I can just leave this platform.
I just wanted to express these mixed feelings I have been getting for my once favorite place to read about other devs experience.

preface: swearing.
because anger.

So. I'm trying to use Material Design with Material UI. The components and UI look *great*.

It's from google, though, which really pisses me off. but I like what I can do with the UI.

HOWEVER.
I really want a grid system for responsiveness. because obviously. besides, i really hate doing all the responsive shit myself. it sucks and i hate it.

Material Design does not include a grid system. okay, it includes a grid component, but it's not for site layout. it's for making a grid of images. or something.

What it does include is a lot of very lengthy documentation on what you should do, complete with fancy graphics saying "THIS IS HOW YOU MUST DO IT OR YOU'RE DOING IT ALL WRONG" -- but they don't actually support it! you must do it all yourself.

Why oh why would they tell you how you must do things if they don't provide the tools to make it possible? fucking google.

You might decide it's a grand idea to interject at this moment and say: "there are plenty of tools out there that allow you to do this!" And sure, you'd be right. however -- and i think this might just barely might be worth mentioning -- THEY REALLY FUCKING SUCK. Hey, let's look at some of the classes! So clear and semantic! This one was nice and simple: "xs4" -- but wtf does that mean? okay, it apparently means 4 columns as they'd appear on an extra-small layout. How does that work on a large layout? Who knows. Now, how about "c12"? okay, maybe 12 columns? but how does that display on a phone with a layout small enough to only have 4 columns? i don't know! they don't know! nobody knows!

oh oh oh oh. and my particular favorite: "mdc-layout-grid__cell mdc-layout-grid__cell--align-bottom" WHAT. THE. FUCK. I'm not writing a goddamn novel! and that one claims to be from google itself. either they've gone insane or someone's totally lying. either way, fuck them.

SO. TERRIBLENESS ASIDE.

Instead of using Material Design v0.fuckoff that lacks any semblance of a grid layout, I figure I'll try v1.0 alpha that actually has one supported natively. It's new and supports everything I need. There's no way this can't be a good idea.

The problem is, while it's out and basically usable, none of the React component libraries fucking work with it. Redux-Form doesn't work with it either because it doesn't understand nested compound controls, and hacking it to work at least triples the boilerplate. So, instead, I have to use some other person's "hey, it's shitty but it works for me" alpha version of someone else's project that works as a wrapper on top of Redux-Form that makes all of this work. yeah, you totally followed that. Kind of like a second-cousin-twice-removed sort of project adding in the necessary features and support all the way down. and ofc it doesn't quite work. because why would things ever be easy?

like seriously, come on.
What i'm trying to do isn't even that bloody hard.

Do I really have to use bootstrap instead?
fuck that.

then again, fuck this significantly more.

UGH.

So yesterday was a regular old day where I came into the office and began my work. My office mate that sits next to me happens to be having an issue with her batch script. It wasn't running correctly so she had decided to call in IT and have them take a look at it. What she was trying to do was process some images through a dedicated super-computer located on site.

So as you can imagine with both of them standing right next to me it was hard not to listen in on their conversation. The IT guy decided to go through a barrage of different troubleshooting methods to figure out what was happening with her script. And soon enough they discovered what was wrong. It happened to be an issue with how Windows decides to deal with new line characters. FYI it looks like this shit "\n \r"

The fucking \r looked like a directory to Linux. So it would squeal to a halt every single time she tried to run.

How this happened was due to her using notepad to edit her batch file.

At this point, I made a comment about her use of Notepad.
"Oh, you're using notepad? I've had similar issues like this in the past when I've used notepad. I really hate notepad." I said with a slight chuckle.

And that was pretty much the end of our encounters. However, at the end of the day, she decided to speak up about this.

"I don't appreciate you making comments about my use of Notepad. That was a form of microaggression towards me, and I don't want you to do it again."

Completely taken aback I replied.
"I'm sorry you took it that way, it was a joke and wasn't meant to be taken personally."

"Well, your intent does not change impact. And by the way, I take pride in my code and scripting. I don't need your commentary about my code nor your micro-aggressions." She said in a huff.

"Well again, I'm sorry you feel that way," I replied back

*I'd like to say that this situation is loosely paraphrased, but the essence of what happened is still there.

At this point, this is what I have to say about this situation. Why the FUCKING FUCK are you using notepad to program anything. There ARE A SHIT TON of differing programs that are available for your use and you decide to use fucking notepad?!?! $%&*@#$^

You could use notepad++, you could use Sublime, you could use every-fucking-thing except Notepad!!! If anything I think I had every right to make a comment about your stupid use of notepad. And darling, your script not working was well deserved, I hope you run into more errors like this because you deserve nothing less for your arrogance. So you can take your opinions and shove them up your fat-ass because at the end of the day I don't give a FUCK about your opinions on my micro-aggressions that you're spouting off about.
I suggest the next time you feel attacked about your code perhaps you should take a cold hard look at yourself before thinking that I'm the one that is the FUCKING problem.

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

I'm the only windows user in my office(my only other choice was Mac). One of the salesmen walks in my office with his macbook.

salesman: what do you know about macs?

me: nothing, why?

salesman: well I just got a new MacBook and I can't right-click, is there like a setting or something I gotta click?

me: well there's no "right-click" by default on Macs, but I think there's a way so you can click with the right side of the touchpad and get the "command-click" you're looking for. stand over there quietly while I finish this function then I'll look into it.

*i proceed to fiddle with some code for 5 or so minutes while he stands in the corner*

me: ok so let's look at your MacBook... ok *at this point I jump on my computer* let's see what Google has to say.

search: enable right-click on mac

me: huh! look at that! Google gives you the answer right there, poof! like magic. now we just follow directions, system settings>keyboard and touchpad>enable click with bottom right corner. bam! anything else?

salesman: yeah, I want the little bar thing to go away *talking about the dock auto-hide

me: ok well that's called the dock, let's ask Google again...look, Google gives the answer again, without even needing to click any links, I could probably click these links and get more in-depth instructions, but right here at the top is the answer

salesman: wow man, thanks! I've got a meeting in 10 minutes and I never would have figured this out.

*before he leaves

me: here take this...

So I've been reading a lot about this #deletefacebook trend across devrant lately. And frankly I'm a little concerned.

As per my understanding, everyone wants to delete Facebook because they're harvesting data. Learning more about us.

While I would agree that I want my privacy. I am a little surprised at how fast this trend is picking up. People are turning a blind eye on everything else they do online just to assume they have privacy.

Let's put this Into perspective, shall we?

You are afraid of letting Facebook harvest your data yet you watch videos on YouTube which is owned by Google. You may even proceed to removing your Google account and use a stripped down version of Chromium to protect yourself from these companies yet you're using a Windows, Mac, iPhone, or Android all of which may be harvesting your data behind the scenes. Some may argue that they have stripped down their android phones but don't take into consideration that you are still using apps on your phone that may be collecting your data.

Let's say that you manage to get out of every sort of technology, you should remember that companies like Facebook also check data about you through your friends.

You use platforms like DuckduckGo assuming that they might not be collecting data about you in some way. I don't think there is anyway for you to prove that these privacy companies don't collect our data.

I don't know why everyone seems to be interested in this trend. I absolutely don't see a point in it. If anything, things I see are super relevant to me.

Here are the reasons why I don't like IPv6.

Now I'll be honest, I hate IPv6 with all my heart. So I'm not supporting it until inevitably it becomes the de facto standard of the internet. In home networks on the other hand.. huehue...

The main reason why I hate it is because it looks in every way overengineered. Or rather, poorly engineered. IPv4 has 32 bits worth, which translates to about 4 billion addresses. IPv6 on the other hand has 128 bits worth of addresses.. which translates to.. some obscenely huge number that I don't even want to start translating.

That's the problem. It's too big. Anyone who's worked on the internet for any amount of time knows that the internet on this planet will likely not exceed an amount of machines equal to about 1 or 2 extra bits (8.5B and 17.1B respectively). Now of course 33 or 34 bits in total is unwieldy, it doesn't go well with electronics. From 32 you essentially have to go up to 64 straight away. That's why 64-bit processors are.. well, 64 bits. The memory grew larger than the 4GB that a 32-bit processor could support, so that's what happened.

The internet could've grown that way too. Heck it probably could've become 64 bits in total of which 34 are assigned to the internet and the remaining bits are for whatever purposes large IP consumers would like to use the remainder for.

Whoever designed IPv6 however.. nope! Let's give everyone a /64 range, and give them quite literally an IP pool far, FAR larger than the entire current internet. What's the fucking point!?

The IPv6 standard is far larger than it should've been. It should've been 64 bits instead of 128, and it should've been separated differently. What were they thinking? A bazillion colonized planets' internetworks that would join the main internet as well? Yeah that's clearly something that the internet will develop into. The internet which is effectively just a big network that everyone leases and controls a little bit of. Just like a home network but scaled up. Imagine or even just look at the engineering challenges that interplanetary communications present. That is not going to be feasible for connecting multiple planets' internets. You can engineer however you want but you can't engineer around the hard limit of light speed. Besides, are our satellites internet-connected? Well yes but try using one. And those whizz only a couple of km above sea level. The latency involved makes it barely usable. Imagine communicating to the ISS, the moon or Mars. That is not going to happen at an internet scale. Not even close. And those are only the closest celestial objects out there.

So why was IPv6 engineered with hundreds of years of development and likely at least a stage 4 civilization in mind? No idea. Future-proofing or poor engineering? I honestly don't know. But as a stage 0 or maybe stage 1 person, I don't think that I or civilization for that matter is ready for a 128-bit internet. And we aren't even close to needing so many bits.

Going back to 64-bit processors and memory. We've passed 32 bit address width about a decade ago. But even now, we're only at about twice that size on average. We're not even close to saturating 64-bit address width, and that will likely take at least a few hundred years as well. I'd say that's more than sufficient. The internet should've really become a 64-bit internet too.

While working, my dad would come and stand behind me. Looking at the indentation, he would sarcastically say things like "Don't you know how to write?" or "Why are you writing so ziggy zaggy? " or "All these years of education, for what?"

The first two or three times I really had a good laugh. But after that, I really get pissed off.

(!dev)

Fuck Twitter.

I get sucked in for 10 minutes through some news article, and my blood is boiling.

I think the platform does not even deserve to exist.

And I didn't think I would ever say that.

I used to be a staunch defender of the free & open internet, even with it's ugly and extreme sides, because I was convinced the good would outshine the evil.

I displayed the Pirate flag with pride on the mast outside of my house, I was intimately involved in the founding of their political party in my country. I was convinced of the power of the internet, I believed it would empower democracy and debate.

So why do simple tweets, even just the ones about technology, incite an endless stream of vile ultranationalist & misogynist hate?

How is it that those who are reasonable get drowned out?

That fucking character limit is a cancer.

The orator's wings are clipped. The richness of language is wilting before our eyes. All that remains are a bunch of caged chickens pecking every argument to death.

I will defend the right to free speech, even when it comes to the most disagreeable and controversial opinions.

But Twitter does not promote free speech. It's poison to free speech.

It's an endless torrent of non sequiturs, which constricts all reason and intellect. It replaces free speech by pretending to have equal value.

I really don't care if you are left or right, socialist or libertarian, globalist or nationalist.

You can argue to me that we should close all borders for immigrants, that Apple makes great products, that genocide has its pros, you could try to convince me that Heineken tastes acceptable (sorry AlexDeLarge), that Linux should be outlawed or that we should really try to bring this Eugenics thing back again.

Just be fucking rational -- and "Rationality implies the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons to believe"

You can NOT fit both your beliefs and their supporting reasons in 140 or even 280 characters.

So what's left is just your beliefs.

Stripped of all reason.

Repeat it often enough, keep spewing, keep throwing out incomplete arguments, and you'll train yourself to forego ratio in your convictions completely.

All social platforms should get a forced captcha for every spelling/grammar error, and a 1000 character minimum.

The world would be a slightly better place.

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.

I'm sure this has probably been posted before, but it never fails to drive me nuts, and customers never stop doing it, so:

Why do end users think "it's broken" is all they have to put into the support ticket?

It's a web app, not a goddamn pretzel.

If the turn signal on your car stops working, do you drop your car off at the mechanic, hand them the keys, and say "its broken, fix it!"?

While I'm on the topic, "I tried to do {x} and it gave an error" is better than "its broken", but still: why do you think what the actual error says would be completely irrelevant, especially when we put in the effort to give you relatively meaningful error messages?

I mean, is "there was a problem sending the email" so utterly gibberish to you that it is indistinguishable from "error: 0x000351e6"?

If so, I'm sorry, but you're too stupid to use a goddamn computer!

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.

You know what you sound like when you say that "I want to be a programmer but this code is offensive so remove it"? It's like saying that "I want to be a surgeon but I don't like blood, so remove the blood right now."

I personally don't really like blood a whole lot, especially when it comes out of the bodies of other people. I don't really want to become a surgeon, but let's say that I would. "Teacher, I don't like blood, I want to become a surgeon but I hate blood!!! MAKE ALL PATIENTS STOP BLEEDING NOW!!!"

To which my teacher surgeon would of course respond: "Well how about you don't become a surgeon then, because humans that are cut open do bleed, and there's nothing we can do about it."

Same thing with code. You know why code is written? To be a useful tool, for people to become more productive by running the thing (unlike the average SJW). And normal people, you know how much they care about the code? They only care for it as much as for it to be able to run properly. And the ones that do look in the source code either want to improve its functionality or check whether it's actually something decent, secure, safe to run etc etc. People don't normally look at code for the sake of getting offended by something.

But the formulation used in the code, does it even matter? Jerk, it's a term that's used in physics. Does it refer to your despised white cis males whacking off? Of course it doesn't, it's a term to describe change in acceleration. Masters and slaves in code, does it refer to slavery? Most certainly it doesn't. So why bother?

#include <rant>

So, in my class I have this one dude who also code, "Awesome" I thought when I first saw that he codes, he codes in c# and claims to know JavaScript.

So I hung out with him a bit on recess/break time, and I eventually found out that he is a d*ckhead

First of all, he claims that he can code ANYTHING, I mean triple A games, the machine that can find pi in 10 seconds. And I know that this isn't true, because he "can't bother" with showing me it.. whatever I think.

I also mentioned that he is a d*ck, why am i saying that? Because if you make an error he would just go, "there is supposed to be *insert random bullshit here* instead of *a typo that I made*, retard. You are honestly fucking stupid" Listen, I love when people point errors out, it really helps. But when you say it like that, it honestly makes me sad. One day, I was messing around with classes in python and he went "hey idiot! That's wrong! There is supposed to be a *random word* instead of *working code*". The funny thing is, HE DOESNT KNOW WHAT PYTHON IS. So I comment out the working code and puts in his c# bs there instead. And he just says, "it isn't working because there's a private class instead of a public class. Ehmm, excuse me? This is python, ok.

Oh and he told me I was a retard because I can't develop triple a games using pure JavaScript.

Any tips on dealing with the guy?

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

Sometimes I have really loose the will to live and find myself face palming multiple times.

I added live chat software a web frontend for a client. Very easy job that consisted of pasting in some embed code. The actual software is very good and has native ios/andriod apps - something specifically requested.

I got a call from my client about an hour ago, saying there is a "serious issue with the live chat".

My client stated the live chat won't work when his staff go home. He asked me what my solution to this was.

Saying "wtf" many times to myself I directed him to a settings within the chat software i.e. an "away mode" where an email is sent when no chat agents are available.

This apparently wasn't good enough and said I hadn't followed his brief of "adding life chat software to the website", which I had.

After a lengthy discussion I found the root of his frustration. He'd signed a contract with a client of his own, stating there would be 24/7 support via live chat on the website.

Obviously there a huge difference between adding a chat widget to a website and committing to having it manned 24/7 :)

After a further 10 minutes of trying push the blame on myself, the client insisted of having the chat software "appear" as someone was always online, even when they are not (people need to sleep ya know!).

Bu design, the chat software requires at least one agent be logged in before the chat status changes to "online" - why wouldn't it.

After a little while I was seriously wondering why I'm involved in this conversation. I jokingly stated: "Well you could always install Andriod/iOS app on your phone, login and permanently leave it running in background. You'd get lots of notifications, but the site would say the live is always online".

The latter was something I said in jest. To my surprise the client said he'd do that on his own phone going forwards. He actually thanked me for my "resourcefulness", lol.

I'm looking at the same dashboard now and there are 407 pending chat requests - his phone must literally be blowing up notifications :)

After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.

Teaching new recruit some SQL (even though hes supposed to fucking know SQL and have multiple years experience but I was a contractor and idgaf, not messing up my money. Just fucking annoying to have an idiot around you all the time).

Me: Okay, so sys tables, so this one is for jobs yeah?

Him: Yeah

Me: Okay, so in this table, its obviously not one row per job per step cos you have multiple rows for the same job and step. Also, there is a datetime field, so what is it showing?

Him: Hmmmmm..... (after some time, back and forth we get to the answer).... history table

Me: Cooooooool, okay, so, lets say, I have a job with 5 steps. If i run it once, how many rows will be in this table?

Him: 5 rows.

Me: Correct, so if I were to have run this same job, 10 times, how many rows get inserted into the table?

Him: (Now...you have to understand, how long this thought process was, im trying to fill the gap with words but really, he was like, having a flashback or something...I kept quiet but silently wanting him to say anything....then he looks me dead in the eyes).... 10!

Me: Motherfucker what!?!? 10 What? If 1 time == 5, what does 10 times ==?

Him: Hmmmmmmmmm.... (yes...we are doing this whole flashback montage all over again)....... Ohhhhh, 1!

Me: .....Stop, think, its a history table. It holds history, for when every step is run for a job, why would it be only one row?

Him: OMG, I know what a history table is!!!!

Me: (Pissed off cos I don't take disrespect calmly). Fine, genius, answer, go!

Him: (LONGER WAIT THAN LAST TIME!!!!)....is it not 10?

Me: I swear, I'm gonna kill you one of these days.

Him: *chuckle*

Me: No...seriously....

TOOK 20-30 MINUTES FOR HIM TO SAY 50!!!!!!

And even then, I swear he didn't understand why. Serious, he was a special breed, had a manager that was a super tard and when I worked here, the spirit of that manager possessed this idiot, the CIO and his little right hand bitch zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

If there was ever a time I was willing to catch a case at work, it was there.

Bonus: Serious, it got to the point I had to come in and tell this idiot that he can only ask me questions today if he calls me by my name...and my name has changed today...and no, you can't ask me for it cos you need my name to ask me questions.....FUCK OFF kkthxbai.

Customer: (calls emergency hotline) We have a really bad bug!
Rep: What seams to be the issue?
Customer: I need to talk to Sam, he knows what to do, tell him it's urgent.
Rep: can I tell Sam what the issue is?
Customer: Well, Sam built a newsletter program but I don't have a way to import mass amounts of emails addresses.
Rep: That sounds like a feature, not a problem.
Customer: why wouldn't it do that? Would you build a car without a steering wheel?
Rep: I am not sure that's relevant to the problem.
Customer: what do you mean?
Rep: I would say it is more like, "would you build a car without a pair of jet skis attached to the back." And we would respond with, "we would be happy to add Jet Skis, but it's going to cost you additional money."
Customer: So, how are we going to fix this bug in YOUR software?
Rep: :/

Just got a call from an Indian scammer. He did the whole press Win + R shabang and I did what he said but the run box didn't appear (maybe cause I'm on a mac) I tried a few more times and then had a moment of enlightenment, I have a mac so that must be why the shortcut isn't working. He then goes on a rant saying everything is fine because he is the best technician and he can fix my mac too. He threatens to hack me and get my name and hack my computer but then goes straight back to his script and asks me to open my browser. I'm asked to go to a website which he mumbles so I don't understand and ask him to spell it for me. This of course is unacceptable and he goes no just type whatever you feel like typing, immediately changing his mind to xvideos.com instead. I say I can't visit the site since I am at work and he goes straight into trying to recruit me. Promises of infinite money and all I could ever wish for. Then he says I should work for him and he would pay me to watch porn which I politely decline. The final interaction was me letting him know I need to get back to work and to tell his call center buddies to never call me. He got super mad at me for accusing him of working at a call center whilst you can hear other calls in the background. 10/10 interaction.

!dev
!!politics (kinda)

Here’s a gem from our recent harassment and diversity training at work:

Speaker: “All of these things are protected from discrimination in California! Wow! It’s a huge list, isn’t it? Now let me ask you a question: is a single white male under 40 protected?”

Everyone: *crickets*

Fucking really?
After immediately jumping on all of the other speaker’s questions, you can’t answer this one?

And later, here’s another gem:

Speaker: “If you witness an employee harassing another employee outside of work and work hours, completely unrelated to work, should you report it? What if you ask the person being harassed and she says no?”

Speaker: “Always report it! While it’s not *technically* required by law, you must report it! Why? Because you have the same protections she would! And maybe it’s easier for you to say something than for her.” (Surprise gendering was her own addition)

Fair on that last point, but against the person’s wishes? Totally not cool. Maybe it wasn’t harassment, or you don’t know the situation. Heads up: you probably don’t. Or maybe it wasn’t a big deal at all, but you think it’s earth-shattering. But all that reporting it against someone’s wishes does is create drama and possibly legal trouble. And if it wasn’t harassment or the case goes poorly, you just created enemies for yourself, or for one or both of them if you’re reporting it anonymously, and possibly even ruined one or both of their jobs/careers by doing so. Good fucking job, asshole.

Snitches get stitches.

Years ago, I was part of a project that went completely off the rails. A little context: we were a services company and we had local offices in cities all over the country. My team provided 2nd-level support which means we often had the PMs call us from those via an annoying Nextel radio.

I won’t go through the details but suffice it to say this project envolved one such branch going rogue and committing actual fraud, with criminal proceedings and all. People were on the edge, and the relationship with that branch was increasingly hostile. There was also an internal power struggle in the company between some directors at that point. In other words, a clusterfuck I’ll always cherish, if by cherish you mean hate hate hate. Anywho…

One time, there was a national holiday on a Thursday and we were going to make it a long weekend. As customary, I communicated with all the PMs about contigency plans. This PM then told us that we could not take Friday off because the customer wanted us to fly over there. We were supposed to be at the customer’s site early Friday morning. That meant we would have to fly Thrusday afternoon. I wasn’t happy.

It immediatly felt arbitrary too. As I said, the relationship was not good and we suspected he was just trying to cost us our days off. I knew enough of the customer to be fairly sure they would not have requested us that Friday. Why did the customer want us then? There was nothing yet on production and if it was just to show progress, surely we could move it to Monday. At worst, can’t we make it over the phone? No, no, no, he said. The customer was adamant that we be there on Friday. Sucked to be us.

So we flew over Thursday afternoon and on Friday morning we headed to the customer’s offices only to find it closed. They too had made it a long weekend and wouldn’t be back until Monday.

Normally I would be furious over the waste of time but to be honest, both I and my colleague smiled at that. It confirmed that the PM just tried to screw us and the customer have never asked for us. We headed back to the local office.

Before coming in, we both bought ourselves some icecream. My friend stayed in the little garden in front and I went in. The PM immediatly saw me and demanded to know why I wasn’t at the customer yet. I didn’t answer. Instead I grabbed the Nextel radio and headed back out with the PM following. I then sat down on the grass and called my director. Smiling and staring at the PM, I told him about the office being closed. The PM’s face froze when my director asked to talk to him.

We sat outside under the sun, enjoying our icecreams while the PM got shouted at. It was the best icecream I’ve ever had.

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

I see many people being irritated when it comes to StackOverflow and If I were to be honest I thought the same a while ago. But I noticed that I was misjudging the main point of Stackoverflow. It's not a forum to help people with their programming problems. It's a huge self writing document to gather every programming related questions and answers under a single platform if possible. That's why they won't down vote you even if you ask a question that was obvious in a language's official document as long as it wasn't in Stackoverflow. That's why questions should also be formatted accordingly which is clear and also informative in itself. I understand why stackoverflow is such a harsh place to ask questions and most of the time I prefer looking things for my self instead of asking a question. And I edit and review most questions on stackoverflow because I enjoy it. That also made me realize that stackoverflow needs to be elitist to preserve it's current quality. Who would want to see unclear duplicate questions that veteran stackoverflow users need to answer over and over again right ?

Asking the right question is hard because we humans most of the time don't know what we don't know. And it makes it really tiring to format your question the way that is fitting for a document. In those times I prefer to ask my questions on a more relaxed and chat focused platform before writing my main question on stackoverflow.

So that was my opinion on stackoverflow and it's harsh environment. It's definetly a hard to get into community which I can't even say I'm really a part of it. But looking at stackoverflow as a document that's being written by ut's users, it's easier to understand it's elitist approach. I hope you had some enjoyment from reading it.

Warning: American perspective of some shit that happens in America that I do not know if it is the same in other places of the world.

I got a notification from my child's school saying that she has been selected for doing <bs activity> between the hours of 1-3 and that parent cooperation is expected. I called the institution and told them that she would not be participating. They asked me WHY, to which I answered that said schedule does not align with my daily schedule. They continue to press as to WHY she would not make it to which I added in a very harsh tone: "because I am fucking working and my wife is fucking working, what age do you think it is? the 1950s in which I can have some meaningless desk job and pay for a house that would be worth half a mil now a days when my wife stays at home all day and just goes with whatever whim y'all have?"

Needless to say, she is no longer in said activity group, but this seems to be very frequent inside of school systems in the U.S, they really ain't evolved much.

No, wait, they have, we have active shooter trainings now, that shit is semi-new.

Out of all the bugs, the most annoying are the ones that come out and make me say "WTF?!?!? WHY THE FUCK HAS IT BEEN WORKING FOR THE LAST 2 YEARS??!!?!!??? THERE"S NO WAY IT COULD HAVE!"

When the bug surfaces, you investigate and see that it indeed IS a bug and there's no way it would ever work w/o a fix. But then SOMEHOW it's been working just fine for years....

It's like server elves went on strike and said "no more, it's enough covering that bug - it's time you fix it, lazy-ass idiot!"

My department is focused solely on web development. Of course we are part of the major portion of I.T

The entire I.T department got acknowledged for a very important piece of software. That I wrote.
The ceremony in which we were being recognized did not listed MY department, no, they listed the ENTIRETY of I.T.

Thing is, if this product was not delivered, then I was told that the blame would be MINE (I am speaking as the head of my department) but apparently if it succeeded (which it did) it is to be attributed to people that were not even involved in the project.

My employees tried calming me down when I got upset, one of them stated that it was not even our department's effort, but mine alone. And yes, I was the one that developed the solution. By myself, with complete testing, staging, the whole works. Everything, developed by me. BUT my employees held the entire department down while I was behind close doors developing this solution.
I was fucking upset, more so because my director sent an email thanking the entire I.T department for this "win"
I asked him through or messaging service if he could point out to me who else was involved, since I did not know of anyone else that did absolutely anything in this process other than myself and my guys.

Maybe the output of my program was parsed by another I.T department and something happened from it, maybe the money generated by the application (obscene amounts of it btw) were used to add more to the infrastructure etc, who knows, but as far as I know, you cannot say "if this fails it is on you" just for them to later on thank people that were not involved in the project.

This is why I would gladly move on to a different field. I don't want to be patted on the back constantly, I know how fucking good I am at what I do. But if I do something amazing I do not want to see those efforts being given to someone else.

The dev world is usually a thankless industry, but if thanks are given, then I want the sole credit.

If I am winning or loosing I want the whole fucking credit and you can be any more gangstah than that.

So I've taken the first steps into mobile development this past week, I attached two joysticks to a basic unity app to check if touch input was working and I guess I never got around to uninstalling it. so I go to school and finish some class work early and decide, why not check and see what it would take to get my current main Alpha project working. I open my unity folder and see Joystick_Test and someone walking by asks "what's that?" To which I reply tapping on the app "it's a touch screen test, to see if the phone can detect me touching the screen and dragging my fingers. I hand him the phone and he asks why nothing is happening which I respond with "it's just an input test, it's not ment to be anything fancy I just need to program the joysticks and the scripts are still in development" and he hands the phone back and says "your lazy as shit. I can make the controls work in under a minute" and he walks away. It's lunch now and I manage to catch him in the library. I open Unity, and Mono-develop and call him over. I get out of my seat and say "program the left joystick to move around. I'll give you a hint, vector3". He sits in the chair and stares at the screen for a solid minute until I see him type
Console.writeline("hello world");
And he said it would work and just walked away.

Once had a manager who would refuse to review anything on the basis he "didn't have enough time". Not just code reviews, but also customer comms, support messages, documentation etc. - anything that it's good to get more than 1 set of eyes on. This was a small startup so me working pretty much solo - it wasn't like there was anyone else able to review anything like this.

Fair enough, you might say. He trusts me. Just put it out there.

...but then *as soon as* it was published / sent / committed / whatever, he'd then magically find 5 minutes to glance through it and point out how rubbish / unhelpful / ridiculous the work was, and how it should have never gone out in the first place, and why didn't I read through it before sending as I'd clearly realise how stupid this was.

After a few rounds of this I actually flipped out on him in the office, called him out on his BS and told him to think for 2 seconds about how ridiculous this situation was. In fairness to the guy he did back down, take note and it didn't happen again, but damn, those times were some of the most frustrating of my career to date.

You know. I have mixed feelings on the way people have been reacting to senzory's rant regarding the way he deals with clients. Some people believe that he is unethical, some people see it as just business(me included) but to see what the community says is somewhat interesting.

First, let me be clear on something: i have been fucked over by clients many times for being a nice guy and trying to play it nicely.

Because of this I am selective of who deserves good treatment and who gets to fuck off. But regardless of the client I do the same thing: regardless of who it is, nice or otherwise. If a project will take 1 week to complete then I tell them that it will take 3 to 4 weeks. Why? Well because I have many things on my plate, I am married and have two children, one lives with me and I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I work from 8 to 6, sometimes later and when I get home I sometimes don't do shit since at work I maintain the web services of 2 fucking college campuses.
I don't look for my clients. Through word of mouth they come to me. And being in a privileged position(there are about 5 devs here and they all suck) they can either do with my times and fees or can fuck off over the border where Pedro will do their shit on vbscript and classic ASP(which I like, but you know why this is not an option in 2018)

Apps can be sold for large quantities of money, regardless of what their use case is, if a company wants to outsource their apps to an external developer(such as yours truly) that means that they are willing to play the game. And that is what business is: a game, a survival game.

Where I live, a company will not think twice of firing a single mother for whatever reason. In the U.S of A, and specially in Texas, you can be fired for whatever reason. I have automated people's jobs without knowing it, I have made people lose their jobs and saved companies thousands with my apps. Things like that were not know to me, had I known that someone would have lost their jobs I would have tried differently.

If a company is willing to tell employees(loyal employees) to fuck off, then i do not regret charging what I do and hustling the way I do with rat faced dickheads that care not for people. If I could I would destroy entire companies here. But that is for another story.

I have been used, insulted, gambled with and have been lied to, to my face by these companies. Which has left me jaded.

Oh now, trust me. I am still highly optimistic and nice. And if someone has a small business and I can help them out, then I will lower my rate and give positive vibes in the hopes of making things better through karma. I want to see the best in people. But this does not stop me from being a shark and giving quotes the way I do.

Because companies, as an overall entity are not people with the best intentions(sometimes) and they will not take your kindness, they will take advantage if possible in an effort to save money. Its just dickhead business.

So why, as a professional and privileged developer that obtained his skills through intense study and practice, a wizard by all means, should lower to these nameless, Faceless entities?
Why should i give them the fairness they do not give others? Why should I play the high morale game and come out as a loser?

At the end of the day, I get to swim in my own pool of success, knowing that they did not get the chance to fuck me over

So if you tell me that you took advantage of your hard earned skillset, and built a cross platform app(which compiles to native binaries) and sold 2 products for one, I will tell you that you are an excellent player at their game. If you tell me that you finished before and got to charge for 2 weeks of work doing just 2 days I will say that you are an excellent time manager. And if you tell me that at the end of the day you managed to keep said customer I will tell you that you are a true professional.

There is a difference lads, in selling a product to big momma jamma's cajun restaurant, to the largest logistics company around.

Be nice to those that desserve it.

I am DONE with this woman.

Background: we're a team of 3 developers and I'm the junior in this team and I've been in this shit for a year now. 2 months ago the team leader left for another project and I had to stand in for him in every responsibility against the PM and other teams.

Now I not only had to endure this insecure woman but I was also supposed to work with her! Fast-forward to today, the team leader is back and I thought I could put my headphones on and work peacefully at last.

But no!

I've found out she's sent a faulty code to production - no big deal - and said that over chat (although she's sitting right behind me):

Me: We need to fix this.
Her: What?

Me: *giving some details about the issue*
Her: Your attitude is important when you ask me to do something. Whenever you're writing to me you're typing on your keyboard like you're going to break it on my head.

*me not knowing what to say at this point because we had something stupid like this before*

Me: So you're offended by the sound my keyboard makes? (I have mx brown switches by the way and they're not even loud)
Her: No you're typing too fast when you're writing to me. The sound echoes in the office.
...

Can you fucking believe this shit? I hate people that think they can educate me but have no idea how to rationally respond to situations and take responsibility! I didn't even say anything!

And she's been saying to me she hadn't had a problem with any other people for gazillion years who knows how long and why would she cause a problem now! And thinks I am the problem, fuck YOU!

Since you don't like receiving orders why hadn't you taken the place when the fucking guy went for another project but I had to take all the responsibility? I know why you fucking entitled bitch.

Because you HAD NO IDEA AND YOU STILL DON'T.

So shut the fuck up and do as I say.

Kind regards

If you are sick...

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

It has nothing to do with how YOU are feeling. It’s about RESPECT for those around you.

Especially if you work in an open office. Coming into an open office when sick is like coughing right on someone’s face repeatedly, it shows that same level of (lack of) respect.

Almost every company I have seen fucks this up so bad. It’s the same shit every year....

People are afraid to take days and stay home. They go in and make everyone sick, then everyone is taking days off and we are “short” on people. Then the incompetent CEO is scratching his head as to why this toxic work environment could produce such a toxic result.

And one more fucking thing.

If you got a cold/flu on Monday and your in the office on Wednesday because you are “feeling a bit better” then your a fucking idiot. At day 3 you are just starting to expel germs while still being highly contagious.

If you come into an open office while sick then I would say...

“Smarten the fuck up! And start showing some respect for the people you work with!”

If you have created (or are creating) a culture that encourages this then I would say...

“Fuck you! You should be fucking smarter than that.”

————

If your still sitting there thinking something like...

“Well I have to attend the meeting” or some other shit. Then let me add this to the pile.

Not everyone has had a rosy fucking life.

You may be working next to someone who has a lowered immune system due to past medical problems. What may be a week of sickness for you could end up being a month in the hospital for them.

You may be working next to a person who has a family member dying of cancer. If you make them sick then they can’t visit that family member (colds can kill cancer patients) and you may be stopping that person from seeing their loved ones one last time before they die.

Don’t be a fucking asshole.

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

(Warning: kinda long && somewhat of a political rant)

Every time I tell someone I work with AI, the first thing to come out of their mouth is "oh but AI is going to take over the world!"

No.

It was only somewhat recently that it started being able to recognize what was in a picture from over 3 million images, and that too it's not that great at. Honestly people always say "AI is just if-else" ironically, but it isn't really that far from the truth, we just multiply an input by weights and check the output.

It isn't some magical sauce, it's not being born and then exploring a problem, it's just glorified-probability prediction. Even in "unsupervised" learning, the domain set is provided; in "reinforcement learning" which has gotten super popular lately we just have the computer decide which policy is optimal and apply that to an environment. It's a glorified decision tree (and technically tree models like XGBoost outperform neural networks and deep learning on a large number of problems) and it isn't going to "decide" to take over the planet.

Honestly all of this is just born out of Elon Musk fans who take his word as truth and have been led to believe that AI is going to take over the world. There are a billion reasons why it can't! And to top it off this takes away a lot of public attention from VERY concerning ethical issues with AI.

Am I the only one who saw Google Duplex being unveiled and immediately thought "fraud"? Forget phone scammers, if you trained duplex on the mannerisms of, for example, a famous politician's voice, you could impersonate them in an audio clip (or even video clip with deepfakes). Or for example the widespread use of object detection and facial recognition in surveillance systems deployed by DoD. Or the use of AI combined with location tracking and browsing analytics for targeted marketing.

The list of ethics breaches are endless, and I find it super suspicious that those profiting the most off of unethical AI are all too eager to shift public concern to some science fiction Terminator style takeover that, if ever possible, would be a long way out and is not any sort of a priority issue right now.

My life could get worse, but it's really shitty now.

Suffering from a serious back injury since last year, my health has been not so positieve lately.
It put a toll on my mood, which in turn asked it's price regarding my relationship. Needless to say that did not go well. Already a fe months single but we kept in touch.

Three days ago my back injury returned, and was unable to lead a normal life. Constant pain, coyld not even move in the house. Even going to the toilet was a terrible experience because when you move, you're in a world of pain.

I asked my ex girlfriend to help me, since she was the only one having a key to my house.

When she arrived i hoped to have some moral support and to help me mive around, ensuring i would not injure myself any more.

Instead i received the cold shoulder. When she wanted to help pe up she did it a bit too hard and the pain sheered thrpughout my body. Screaming in pain.

She promptly left, leaving keys behind.

The hardest part is that she just left without me being able to explain clearly why i screamed. She thought i was yelling at her while in reality i was yelling due to the immense pain.

After that i had to cut ties forever. Tabula rasa. So i removed everything that is related to that time and locked it in my vault.

Since then i can hardly focus, my mibd is numb and i cannot think straight. The alcohol and other sedatives are probably also involved, but still i feel my life is a mountain of depressing shit.

Needed to vent. And yes i post this because i have a need for some understanding, yes for now i crave for some attention and some encouraging, supportive words. I'm left With no other options since the person i wanted it from the most has simply left... And the fact i am unable to actually be social outside...

Fuck friends and relationships, right?

Am I really unlucky, or are juniors these days all lazy af and such pampered babies that need hand holding all the time?
So back when I was a junior, when I wanted to learn something new, I would ask for some pointers from my seniors, could be an article, a video or even a book. From there I would look up further knowledge, play with the idea in my machine. If I couldn't understand something, or if I needed a better explanation of something, I would go back to my senior, but it was really rare.
Then comes this modern day, I'm the senior now and I'm in charge of mentoring a bunch of kids, who would treat me like their personal chatgpt. "Hey Junior #0, this is something you may want to read to help your next ticket, let me know if you have difficulty". Next day junior #0 would come back and say "I don't understand, the article mentioned X but I don't know how to do X. Can you show me how to do X?". Bro, no one knows how to do X after being born, just google "how to do X" and it gives you the fucking answer. Why the fuck do you have to circle back to me because of this. Junior #1 would refuse to read any articles longer than 250 words, and require constant 1-1 meetings to give him personal lectures. Dude this is not a class room, grow the fuck up! Junior #3 would write the messiest code possible despite my efforts to introduce tons of resources, then complain "why I'm still junior, how do I grow". Bro maybe if you learned half of what I sent you, you would have gotten promote by now. Fucking lazy kids these days!
Oh I can't fire these juniors. Top management was very clear that "we don't have budget to hire other devs for you, it's your responsibility to train them better".

When defining a range, let's say from 1 to 3, I expect:

[1, 2, 3]

Yet most range functions I come across, e.g. lodash, will do:

_.range(1, 3)
=> [1, 2]

And their definition will say: "Creates an array of numbers ... progressing from start up to, but not including, end."

Yet why the fuck not including end? What don't I understand about the concept of a frigging range that you won't include the end?

The only thing I can come up with that's this is related to the array's-indexes-start with-0-thing and someone did not want to substract `-1` when preparing a for loop over an 10 items array with range(0,10), even though they do not want a range of 0 to 10, they want a range from 0 to 9. (And they should not use a for loop here to begin with but a foreach construct anyway.)

So the length of your array does not match the final index of your array.

Bohhoo.

Yet now we can have ranges with very weird steps, and now you always have to consider your proper maximum, leading to code like:

var start = 10;
var max = 50;
var step = 10;

_.range(start, max + step, step)
=> [10, 20, 30, 40, 50]

and during code review this would scream "bug!" in my face.

And it's not only lodash doing that, but also python and dart.

Except php. Php's range is inclusive. Good job php.

Fuck our new project manager.

Literally all she does in her time is schedule meetings for others and send us emails stating that X needs to be done by date or why are we delayed with Y. Then she even manages to completely screw us with the meetings she schedules.

Today I woke up to seeing a beautiful gapless column of colorful rectangles in my dairy.... for today. And last time I saw this Monday it only had 2.5 hours of meetings!!

Now a lot of us from our team had the Friday afternoon off so it may be that she did this beautiful piece of artwork during that time, in which case she could somewhat rightfully say that we should have taken a look at it. But we actually have a convention to only schedule planning meetings for Mondays which these fucking aren't and even if she hadn't known this, who the fuck schedules a ton of meetings to Monday?! from a Friday afternoon?!?!

By the way the new pretty pink and orange meetings I have today are about actually important topics in between which I would normally appreciate to grab a tea or at least use the fucking restroom. Officially I only have a 45 minute lunch break all day.

Oh and naturally she sets up the meetings as organiser so that we can only suggest her new times and can't change it on our own.

But naturally PM lady never actually attends the meetings because she wouldn't understand shit. So when my fav female colleague, Sammy and I joined our 11am meeting, the first thing Sammy said - well after I greeted her by "wtf" - is to just leave the call on while we grab brunch.

So here I am sitting in the close by park with my brunch and thought I could use the now extended lunch break time efficiently by ranting my ass of and asking you guys why the fuck such people like our PM get paid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 1: Run to the store to buy a USB card reader because all of a sudden you have a need to use a 16Mb CF card that was tossed in a junk drawer for 20 years (hoping it still works, of course), but that was the easy part...

Step 2: Realize that the apps - your own - you want to run on your new (old) Casio E-125 PocketPC (to re-live "glory" days) are compiled in ARM format, not MIPS, which is the CPU this device uses, and the installer packages you have FOR YOUR OWN APPS don't include MIPS, only ARM (WHY DID I DO THAT?!), so, the saga REALLY begins...

Step 3: Get a 20-year old OS to install in a Hyper-V VM... find out that basic things like networking don't work by default because the OS is so damn old, so spend hours solving that and other issues to get it to basically run well enough to...

Step 4: Get that OS updated so that it's at least kind/sorta/maybe (but between you and me, not really!) safe online, all without a browser that will work on ANY modern site (oh, and good luck finding a version of Firefox that runs on it - that all took a few hours)...

Step 5: Okay, OS is ready to go, now get 20-year old dev tools that you haven't even seen in that many years working. Oh, do this with a missing CD key and ISO's that weren't archived in a format that's usable today, plus a bunch of missing dependencies because the OS is, again, SO old (a few MORE hours)...

Step 6: Get 20-year old code written in a language you haven't used in probably almost that long to compile, dealing with pathing issues, missing libs, and several other issues, all the while trying to dust off long-dormant knowledge somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of your brain... surprisingly, it all came back to me, more or less, in under an hour, which lead to...

Step 7: FINALLY get it all to work, FINALLY get the code to compile, FINALLY get it transferred to the device (which has no network capabilities, by the way, which is where the card reader and CF card came into play) and re-live the glory of your old, crappy PocketPC apps and games running on the real thing! WOO-HOO!

Step 8: Realize it's 3:30am by the time that's all done and be VERY thankful that you're on vacation this week or work tomorrow would SSUUCCKK!!!!

Step 9. Get called into work the next day for a production issue despite being tired from the night before and an afternoon of errands, lose basically a whole day of vacation (7 hours spent on it) and not actually resolve it by after midnight when you finally say that's enough :(

Talk about your highs and your lows.

iPhones are ridiculously picky when it comes to finding a mate- um charger. And knowing why doesn't really make it any easier to understand why. If anything it baffles me more.

So, let's start with appliances that are not phones. Think Bluetooth headsets, keyboards, earbuds, whatever. Those are simple devices. They see 5V on the VCC line and 0V on ground, and they will charge at whatever current they are meant to. Usually it will not exceed 200mA, and the USB 2.0 spec allows for up to 500mA from any USB outlet. So that's perfectly reasonable to be done without any fuss whatsoever.

Phones on the other hand are smarter.. some might say too smart for their own good. In this case I will only cover Android phones, because while they are smarter than they perhaps should be, they are still reasonable.

So if you connect an Android phone to the same 5V VCC and 0V ground, while leaving the data lines floating, the phone will charge at 500mA. This is exactly to be within USB 2.0 spec, as mentioned earlier. Without the data lines, the phone has no way to tell whether it *can* pull more, without *actually* trying to pull more (potentially frying a charger that's not rated for it). Now in an Android phone you can tell it to pull more, in a fairly straightforward way. You just short the data lines together, and the phone will recognize this as a simple charger that it can pull 1A from. Note that shorting data lines is not a bad thing, we do it all the time. It is just another term for making a connection between 2 points. Android does this right. Also note that shorted data lines cannot be used to send data. They are inherently pulled to the same voltage level, probably 0V but not sure.

And then the iPhones come in, Thinking Different. The iPhones require you to pull the data lines to some very specific voltage levels. And of course it's terribly documented because iSheep just trying to use their Apple original white nugget charger overseas and shit like that. I do not know which voltage levels they are (please let me know!), but it is certainly not a regular short. Now you connect the iPhone to, say, a laptop or something to charge. An Android phone would just charge while keeping data transmission disabled (because they can be left floating or shorted). This is for security reasons mostly, preventing e.g. a malicious computer from messing with it. An iPhone needs to be unlocked to just charge the damn thing. I'm fairly sure that that's because the data lines need to be pulled up, which could in theory enable a malicious computer to still get some information in or out of it. USB data transmission works at at least 200mV difference between the data lines. It could be more than that. So you need to unlock it.

Apple, how about you just short your goddamn data lines too like everyone else? And while you're at it, get rid of this Lightning connector. I get it, micro USB was too hard for your users. I guess they are blind pigs after all. But USB-C solved all of that and more. The only difference I can think of is that the Lightning connector can be a single board with pads on either side on the connector, while in USB-C that could be at the socket end (socket being less common to be replaced). And at the end of the day, that really doesn't matter with all the other things that will break first.

Think Different. Think Retarded. Such tiny batteries and you can't even fucking charge them properly.

So lets see if i can get this devrant stuff right.

So a couple of years ago i worked for this company, where i worked in datawarehousing and business intelligence. I was in my 3rd year of working as a software engineer and was full of ideas, motivation and just wanted to do cool stuff.

Anyway, after the first couple of months of working where i learned what they actually wanted to achieve, i got some ideas on how to improve the workflow. They were just simple things, like updating our IDE (we were working with a very old Visual Studio version), getting useful editors, using some more modern ideoms like unittests, continous integration, etc. Simple stuff really.

So in my endless naiveness i went to my supervisor and told him my ideas. He was not particularly interested in my ideas and cut me off somewhere in the middle and said that he would talk to his boss.

So a couple of weeks after that (nothing happened), i went to him again and asked about it.
M:" Hey Bossman, have you thought about my ideas?"
B:"Yes."
M:"And?"
B:"We won't do them."
M:"None of them?"
B:"No."

So at this point i was a bit bummed out, but surely he has a good reason right? So i asked why.

M:"Why?"
B:"Well, because we always have done it the way we do it now."

I think i had a bit of a blank stare at that point, because he looked at me funny. If we would do things like we always have done them, we would be still in the stone age you moron.

God i hate it when people say stuff like that.

> One of my guys from work.

> Walks up to my office
> Says "say something cursed about software development or programming that would make people cry"

> Me: "If I could I would program games and neural networks with PHP"

> Him: .......you fucking monster.

> Walks away

For reference: We both like php, but know and understand why that is a baaaaad idea.

Grr the feeling when one of your interviewers has a hard-on for trying to find ways to sink your boat.

Went to a job interview yesterday during my lunch break for a mid level dev job in central London , i have been trying to transition from a junior role.

First were two senior devs , that went quiet well...

Next up was the tech lead and a team lead, lets call the latter Mc-douche for some problem

The tech lead was fine, very relaxed and clam guy more interested in seeing the logic of my answers and questions as to why i did certain things in this or that manner....

Mc-douche, he would always try to find something wrong then smile smugly and do that sideways head waggle thing

His tech lead is like " yup that's correct"
But he would be like " yeeess but you didn't think about bla bla bla" then talk about shit not even present in the context of the question

Ah also he would ask a question then cut me off as soon as I begin to say that i didnt mention or take into account x or y even though literally my next sentence is about address those details he wanted.
let me fucking finish you dickbag 😡

Had a js question, simple stuff about dom manipulation, told not to bother with code... yet McD starts asking me to write the code for it....managed it , quite easy stuff

Then a sql and db test , again technlead was happy with the answers and the logic am approaching the question when writing my query, yet mc d Is bitching about SQL syntax....
Ok fine, i made a simple mistake, I forgot and used WHERE instead of HAVING in a group by but really?! Thats his focus ?!

Most devs I know look up syntax to do stuff , they focus on their logic first the do the impl.

Then a general question on some math and how i would code to impl a solution on paper
That was a 20 mins one, the question said they didn't expect me to finish it totally so
I approached it like an exam question.

First
I focussed on my general flow of my process, listing out each step.

Then elaborated each step with pseudo code showing my logic for each of the key steps.

Then went deeper and started on some of the classes and methods , was about to finish before it was time up.

Mc douch went through my solution
And grudgingly admitted my logic was "robust enough" it was like he really had to yank that deep out of his colon.

I didn't really respond to any of his rudeness throughout the whole interview,i either smiled politely or put on a keen looking poker face.

Really felt awful the rest of the day, skipped the gym and went home after work, really sucks to have a hostile interviewer.

Pretty sure i wont be hearing anything good from them even though the three other interviewers were happy with me I felt.

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

Argh,

Today - you son of a bitch.

It all started with a 2 hour flight out of town for business, and I mean started as in I needed to be at the airport at 4:30am!

Despite 2 coffee's to get me out of bed I proceeded to indulge myself in the magic juice, 3 cups later and it felt like my heart belonged in a Grand Prix.

Now here is the sticky part, we where briefed that we would only be doing 2 site meetings and that was it.

Low and be hold it got worse, turns out that we would be pitching our product to 3 highly regarded CEO's, now bare in mind that my position on this trip is as the lead developer, and don't get me wrong I am well up to date on every aspect of the business, hence why they sent me.

So more coffee down the gullet, and eventually the conversation leads back to a project that I had developed to allow authorization of debit orders online, now usually I'm quite a well presented person in these types of situations, but you don't realize how quick this can change.

A quick jump to the geography of the location I was doing business. Johannesburg, South Africa - its as dry as hell, smoggy and at a very higher altitude "as in above sea level".

Now unfortunately none of the above factors where helping me much at all.

Now back to where I am being asked about my project, and never in my life have I tripped over my own words, I went completely blank, I'm surprised I didn't pass out to be honest.

Now despite the death stare and my colleague kicking me under the table, I am feeling pretty terrible, fortunately I had a kick ass team that was able to cover my ass!

Luckily I was able to recover ( 2 muffins and about 3 bottles of water later). We where able to salvage the meeting and it turned out pretty well, I regained my energy and we made it happen!

Must say the flight back was amazing! Almost empty and we all had a row of seats to ourselves, which resulted in some major comfort stretching!

Thanks for tolerating my essay, I'd love to hear if anyone has had anything of the sorts happen to them.

I need to share this with someone:

I've been using this app for months, maybe an year, without contributing cuz I didn't have anything really valueable to say.

Generaly, my girlfriend and family work at the beach in summer and they need my help but than again I can find the perfect career starting intern which will be worth perspectively at that time.

Why the fuck is my family doing this to me. They obviously need help but I am delaying my career for two years now because of that but after all, family is my treasure and it's more valueable than a career, there will always be internships but what stops me from spending a decade more and still be making the same mistake, but if I don't go I might break up with my gf and mess family things even more I don't want that, what would you do ?

sooooooooo for my current graduate class we were to use the MVC pattern to build an IOS application(they preferred it if we did an IOS application) or if you didn't have an Apple computer: an Android application.

The thing is, they specified to use Java, while in their lectures and demos they made a lot of points for other technologies, hybrid technologies, such as React Cordova, all that shit, they even mentioned React Native and more. But not one single mention of Kotlin. Last time I tried my hand at Android development was way before Kotlin, it was actually my first major development job: Mobile development, for which we used Obj C on the IOS part and well, Java on the Android part.

As some of you might now, I rarely have something bad to say about a tech stack(except for VBA which I despise, but I digress) and I love and use Java at work. But the Android API has always seem unnecessarily complex for my taste, because of that, when I was working as a mobile development I dreaded every single minute in which I had to code for Android, Google had a great way to make people despise Java through their Android API. I am not saying it is shit, I am not saying it is bad, I just-dont-like-it.

Kotlin, proves a superior choice in my humble opinion for Android development, and because the language is for retards, it was fairly easy for me to pick it up in about 2 hours. I was already redesigning some of my largest Spring applications using half the code and implemented about 80% of the application's functionality in less than 3 hours(login, fragment manipulation, permissions, bla bla) and by that time I started to wonder if the app built on Kotlin would be ok. And why not? If they specifically mentioned and demonstrated examples using Swift, then surely Kotlin would be fine no? Between Kotlin and Java it is easy to see that kotlin is more similar to Swift than Java. So I sent an email. Their response: "I am sorry, but we would much rather you stick with the official implementations for Android, which in this case is Java for the development of the application"

I was like 0.o wat? So I replied back sending links and documentation where Google touted Kotlin as the new and preferred way to develop Android applications, not as a second class citizen of the platform, but as THE preferred stack. Same response.

Eventually one of the instructors reflected long enough on it to say that it was fine if I developed the application in Kotlin, but they advised me that since they already had grading criteria for the Java program I had to redo it in Java. It did not took me long really, once I was finished with the Kotlin application I basically rewrote only a couple of things into Java.

The end result? I think that for Android I still greatly prefer Kotlin. Even though I am not the biggest fan of Kotlin for anything else, or as my preferred language in the JVM.

I just.......wish....they would have said something along the lines of: "Nah fam please rewrite that shit for Java since we don't have grading criterias in place for Kotlin, sorry bruh, 10/10 gg tho" instead of them getting into an email battle with me concerning Kotlin being or not being the language to use in Android. It made me feel that they effectively had no clue what they were talking about and as such not really capable of taking care of students on a graduate level program.

Made me feel dirty.

DO NOT be afraid to argue with people. It doesnt matter who they are. Senior engineers, tech leads, delivery managers, if you know something is wrong make it heard. I made a point of telling my Project Manager that the current project is the worst ive ever seen. The technology is awful and we all hate the development. They need to know this stuff. And if they come to you with a deadline that you dont think you can make, say it then and there. Then they cant come back and say why isnt this done. Basically dont just do as youre told. If we needed that we would get robots to do our job. We need people who think and have opinions and make those opinions heard at the appropriate level.

Story Time.

TL;DR - Because of Corporate PTSD, I replace the word "everyone/folks/guys" with "Team" when I'm addressing my colleagues, whether it be an e-mail or verbally (F2F/Zoom/GMeet).

In 2019, An office job I worked at, a new Vice President joined the company (the same one who told me he saw me in his dream).

We were required, on a daily basis, to form a circle and one-by-one everyone would out-loud say their yesterday's and current day's tasks updates.

So before the VP joined, everyone was free to initiate their turn however they wanted. Phrases like "Hey Everyone", "Good morning all" or "Hi All" was all around acceptable.

But the moment he started joining the stand-ups, he felt the need to change this phrase to a standard "Good morning Team". No other variations of this. Only and ONLY these three words.

Why you ask? Because saying Good morning is good manners and using the word "Team" strengthens the bond between co-workers and increases collaboration and creativity.

Some colleagues were bound to forget this and they did, which resulted in the VP blasting at everyone for doing so. He would show genuine rage over this, almost as if the company would go out of business because of us, not complying to do so.

Now imagine, you get up at 8 AM, get ready, commute, and get ready to speak for the standup and you get yelled at in front of everyone, FIRST THING before you start working.

Needless to say, it would kill everyone's spirit for getting their day started but nobody could speak up against him because obviously, he was the VP of the company then.

And oh yes, our CEO fired him 5 months after that because he (the VP) got slammed with a pedophilia-related lawsuit, by the parents of a 5-year old.

Recently I disassembled this Remington beard trimmer that I have, right. Thinking that I probably just depleted the battery or something like that, and that that's why the fucking thing would turn off after 10 seconds, with a miserable motor speed that could only be caused by what.. 2.5V or something like that? So I kept up with it for a while, and then a few days ago, I finally disassembled the fucking thing.

New 4.2V LiPo battery of my own attached, wicked! The thing has a 2Ah capacity and is fully charged, so fuck all in a big ship, I'ma shave my fucking hair without protection, who cares with 2Ah anyway, given that motors at 4.2V consume only 800-ish mA, right. So I shaved my head, and figured.. holy shit mate, I fucking beat this fucking cunt, fuck you Remington! Planned obsolescence my ass!!!

Just now @xewl sent me a request that made me reconsider this shaver. Some PS3 controller, should be easy enough to fix. But I referenced my shaver so I figured that I might actually check it beforehand.

The original fucking battery has 4V left on it. 4 fucking volts! That ain't gonna trip shit for an overdischarge protection circuit!!! WHY THE FUCK REMINGTON, WHY THE FUCK DID IT (IF ANYTHING) TRIP?! And more importantly, why did you make the motor turn for only 10-ish seconds after charging, 1 year after purchase, despite the fucking cell having 4 fucking volts in it, which is more than plenty to get the thing turning for at least a 60% charge?! Planned obsolescence perhaps, hmm?

But let's say that it was bad contacts or something like that. After all, my probing was a bit intermittent, showing 1.5V (if it's shorting, shouldn't it be in the mV range?) and then 4V at times, until I separated the nickel connectors from the 16500 cell. Why the fuck should that thing short, considering that it's unprotected?! The fucking cell is unprotected, and you Remington are going to let it short? What kind of fucking engineering is that, you fucking braindead morons?!!!

And why do you use a 16500 cell which isn't very standard over a 18650 cell, which is? Again, planned obsolescence? Fucking vile pieces of shit.

Now what's more.. I tried to power on the shaver for a picture for this fucking rant, using a LiPo cell of my own that I used to shave my hair with the other day, to get a nice picture of my little hack. But the fucking thing, despite having 3.89V left in it after that fucking shave, which is more than plenty for a lithium cell, the fucking unit doesn't power on. WHAT THE FUCK REMINGTON?!! That's planned obsolescence at its best, init?!! You vile fucking pieces of shit.

So I guess that this rant is no more one of "I beat these Remington cunts". It is one of "you can bet your fucking ass that planned obsolescence is a thing!!"

26 or so hours up now. And I've got a few stories to tell :) feel free to refresh your cup of coffee and take a seat.

Last few days I've been going into this odd place called intown.irl to get in touch with its inhabitants. An odd place I have to say. But in some cases quite rewarding, even got a MILF home with me and into bed at some point. Anyway...

3 days ago I think it is now? Thursday evening I took my laptop to this local bar where I had this issue about dihydrogen monoxide with one of the bartenders earlier (you'll find that rant on those keywords). Still wanted to visit it regardless though, as I met that first woman there earlier that approached me. Unfortunately I didn't see her there that day.

Some bald guy who was clearly drunk approached me. Many people were already giving curious looks at this laptop I brought to the bar. I finally tuned it up with the stickers from FOSDEM.. I'll put a picture of it in the comments. My theme was one of privacy (central), distributions and Google's open source initiative (which aligns with the keychain token I got from them as well). But of course.. that guy.. he thought that a pimped/riced laptop obviously meant that I was a hacker.

Guy went to the toilet.. went back.. and suddenly grabbed my laptop and turned it towards him. Boy was I never more smugly satisfied that those rubber pads on the bottom are quite resilient. Could've almost damaged my screen by trying to grab it like that. But it's a CCFL display.. so high voltage. If it were to become broken.. worth it. 😈

On it at the time was a terminal, pinging Google (had network issues at that bar, to the point where one of the - I think - staff members got up to me and offered the WiFi password and got to talk with me.. more on that later), and my usual Linux desktop along with the Arch anime wallpaper with the quote of Da Vinci.. simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Of course the guy saw the terminal.. and probably reaffirmed.. yep, that's a hacker. At least he wasn't too wrong about the general term.. but the hat.. most likely he was wrong on that one.

Guy left with this question.. "you are a hacker, aren't you."
I replied to him: "No sir. I'm not a hacker. I've got no idea what you're talking about."
Guy kept looking at me weirdly for the whole night to come.

Back to that companion guy though. Mac user, yada yada.. but he told me about his backup solution. Apparently - I shit you not - he has not only the photos on his local device, he's also frequently backing them up in Time Machine (which I was really curious about whether it uses mirroring or snapshots.. he couldn't tell, lmk if you do) but not only that.. he was storing another offsite backup in that very bar, in case his house went on fire.

Now that is a proper backup scheme!!! If only more people were like that.

Seriously though.. that bald guy who took my laptop just like that... I just let it slide for that one time, but I tend to treat my machines as an extension of my very self. I think that was a very uncalled for move. Asshole...

How would you have reacted to such a thing? And.. maybe that's why we technologists don't get outside too often? Fucking everything is hacking these days if it's not Knopkes and Blinkenlights… Not every shell is a h4xx0ring console for h3kk1ng de fasbuk…

Making electronics more difficult to repair with security fasteners and ultrasonically welded plastic nightmares and what have you.. what's the point? The argument from manufacturers is that "users don't want to get in there anyway". But, it's not like even if they could, they'd want to, right? Which type of person that doesn't know electronics very well and has an interest in repairing it would go and look at a board, and say "this is how it works, this and that is broken and this is how it should be repaired"? Not many users can repair their own devices regardless. So why? To preserve IP? Not like the Chinese bootleggers care about that. To preserve sales? Users can't repair their stuff anyway. To keep those who want to peek inside out, just for the hell of it? Anyone determined enough will be willing to break it in the process anyway.

Why would someone hire you to build a website, constantly say that you don’t know business, never give you anything you ask for, berate you for asking questions about what they want the website to be like, “that’s your job”, all while expecting under $500? Because they’re stupid, that’s why. Oh also, they now want an app instead of a website because their generic-ass domain name was taken already. Fffffffffff

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I'm fucking sick of my experience with the world.

I have a feeling that all that 1984 conspiracy type of ideas that I previously considered bullshit and fear mongering are real.

(Just to be clear, I'm not including most conspiracy theories which are very ignorant like flat earth, fake moon landing, or antivax, the people that spread those theories can die a horrible death IMHO).

Corporation consolidation is a fact and appears to become irreversible.

Because of technology, I can stay in the comfort of my house, safe from crime and be entertained without needing to have direct contact with humans.
People might say "that's your fault for not leaving the house". True but that is just how the world is.

The outside world in the cities I lived in is not a welcoming place.
Hell if you fucking find a bench it's a goddamn miracle, and if you do and sit for a long time, the police stares at you like you are up to something.

People don't talk to you because "don't talk to strangers".
It can be rare to find water or a bathroom that isn't a complete shithole.

So no wonder I rather stay at home, the outside world is hostile.

So yeah, go to a mall or something. And consume, consume, consume, because the outdoors suck.

Many pioneers thought technology was to improve the quality of life.

But no, it's just more isolation, less direct contact with people, less giving a fuck about other people.

And that's how feel about people of today. The least amount of fuck giving about others possible.

You would you would connect to more people faster, but no, the result is just millions of people browsing through the same "entertainment", shitty aggregated content.

Yes, consolidation affects internet too. Everything goes through fucking google, youtube, or whatever other fucking top 10 company.

Just like the class disparity, 1% of the things online get 99% of the exposure.

So if you're a small time anything, basically fuck you, because you're not something enormous.

Like, I wished I was a game developer, but there's thousands of brilliant indie games that get released every year, and they barely make what they're worth.
So why should I fucking try? So I can get ruined financially and I don't have a place to live in?

Software itself is so complex that is impossible to scrutinize decently.
We all laugh at congressmen asking the zuck silly questions.

Out of touch, true, but in hindsight, it is true to some extent that software is hard to regulate. Every software I on earth doesn't meet some standard one way or another.

Or maybe it's just too many of us right now.
When people scroll their search results to get access to the things they should be interested in, the only practical interface right now is being showing one link at a time.
But there's millions and millions of results.

One redeeming aspect of life is that one day I won't be alive anymore to observe the disgusting world we live in.

This could be just pure rambling and I can't prove any of the things I'm saying, I could just have been making the wrong friendships. So take this with a grain of salt.

Today on "How the Fuck is Python a Real Language?": Lambda functions and other dumb Python syntax.

Lambda functions are generally passed as callbacks, e.g. "myFunc(a, b, lambda c, d: c + d)". Note that the comma between c and d is somehow on a completely different level than the comma between a and b, even though they're both within the same brackets, because instead of using something like, say, universally agreed-upon grouping symbols to visually group the lambda function arguments together, Python groups them using a reserved keyword on one end, and two little dots on the other end. Like yeah, that's easy to notice among 10 other variable and argument names. But Python couldn't really do any better, because "myFunc(a, b, (c, d): c + d)" would be even less readable and prone to typos given how fucked up Python's use of brackets already is.

And while I'm on the topic of dumb Python syntax, let's look at the switch, um, match statements. For a long time, people behind Python argued that a bunch of elif statements with the same fucking conditions (e.g. x == 1, x == 2, x == 3, ...) are more readable than a standard switch statement, but then in Python 3.10 (released only 1 year ago), they finally came to their senses and added match and case keywords to implement pattern matching. Except they managed to fuck up yet again; instead of a normal "default:" statement, the default statement is denoted by "case _:". Because somehow, everywhere else in the code _ behaves as a normal variable name, but in match statement it instead means "ignore the value in this place". For example, "match myVar:" and "case [first, *rest]:" will behave exactly like "[first, *rest] = myVar" as long as myVar is a list with one or more elements, but "case [_, *rest]:" won't assign the first element from the list to anything, even though "[_, *rest] = myVar" will assign it to _. Because fuck consistency, that's why.

And why the fuck is there no fallthrough? Wouldn't it make perfect sense to write

case ('rgb', r, g, b):
case ('argb', _, r, g, b):
case ('rgba', r, g, b, _):
case ('bgr', b, g, r):
case ('abgr', _, b, g, r):
case ('bgra', b, g, r, _):

and then, you know, handle r, g, and b values in the same fucking block of code? Pretty sure that would be more readable than having to write "handeRGB(r, g, b)" 6 fucking times depending on the input format. Oh, and never mind that Python already has a "break" keyword.

Speaking of the "break" keyword, if you try to use it outside of a loop, you get an error "'break' outside loop". However, there's also the "continue" keyword, and if you try to use it outside of a loop, you get an error "'continue' not properly in loop". Why the fuck are there two completely different error messages for that? Does it mean there exists some weird improper syntax to use "continue" inside of a loop? Or is it just another inconsistent Python bullshit where until Python 3.8 you couldn't use "continue" inside the "finally:" block (but you could always use "break", even though it does essentially the same thing, just branching to a different point).

*The Fearless Leader*

I get a call to check up on a robot that has been exceeding weight limits at certain points of its movement (Crashing). As I get to the pendant (robo-game controller thingy I like to call it) and look over the alerts and warnings I notice some oil around the main power box of the Robot.... Nothing around this has oil.. so I start looking around and it turns out that the issue wasn’t a crash at all! It was an oily shorted out wire that kept sparking mad heavy when that servo was called on.. causing a large servo failure that required a full restart of the power box. I called our fearless leader and showed him only to find out that there was a motor leaking oil from the electrical end... My fearless leader runs both the Maintenance and Robotics department. When the motor was eventually fixed we overheard the technicians say that our fearless leader knew about this a week ago and decided to leave it that way.... with oil... coming out of an electrical cable..... *sigh* well Anyway after all the wires were fixed and motors changed. He comes up to me and says that he can’t believe that I didn’t call maintenance and fill a report on negligence of technicians for failing preventative maintenance....

I lost my cool a little, firstly that’s not my job, I’m literally one of the lowest ranking here. I called my next in command to figure out what I should do. Secondly the technicians told me that you told them to leave it like that! So if this place caught on fire this would have been on you!

Later I found out that he was trying to fire a technician and wanted me to do the dirty work.. I’m not going to be the reason another man loses the means for him to feed his family. The technician is a pretty cool and fair guy too!

Our fearless leader was a forklift driver and has no experience in robotics or maintenance... I don’t know how this happens or even why but all I know is this man is running both departments to the ground and management loves him.....

"Graphics don't matter."

I ranted a while back about gamedev being hard to get into for me, and, today, user @DOSnotCompute posted a similar experience.

I had a couple more thoughts, so thought should post them here (FUCK! It ended up being too fucking long! sorry!)

So I was watching the making of mortal kombat 3 on yt, which was pretty amazing btw because I got to see the actors of the sprites in game which were engraved in my and thousands of others kids minds.

Anyhow, the creators of the series, John Tobias and Ed Boon, were interviewed and what not. And it hit me that while both were the designers, John was the main artist and Ed was the programmer (at least for MK1). Another game that comes to mind Super Meat Boy, and I bet hundreds of others did the same.

And it got me thinking, maybe that's my problem, I just need an artist.

And I think the reason why I never thought of that is because of this idea that graphics don't matter.

"you don't need an artist. You don't need graphics. The most important thing is the gameplay."

What a load of shit.
A lot of people believe that because they got tired of polished AAA games with automatic and predictible gameplay.

People started parrotting this knee jerk of a conclusion since then.

It's dumb. Imagine if Infiminer, one of the games Minecraft was based on, which btw looks terrible, had all the same features Minecraft had.
I would still not touch that shit with a pole.

Graphics ARE important. Games are on the VISUAL medium.
That doesn't mean you're sucking Sony's dick on every AAA release or that every game should be made with UnreUnityCocksReloadedEngine.

Some level of visual craft is required for a game ro be considered such.

(btw, I think most of you guys here get this, not trying to pander, just that I want to make it clear that I'm not accusing this community of being guilty of this)

If a game looks bad (given, bad can be subjective), if it gives the impression that it wasn't seriously made, then you kinda lower your expectations.

People get hyped on games that look good, because it means that the game could be good. Games that look unoriginal or terrible won't get played, wether they're good or not. And I think it's a reasonable reaction.

How many times did I hear things like "Look at x video game from the 90s, the graphics are terrible but it's fun as hell".

That is an absurd statement. The level of production some NES games went through is insane. We're talking millions of dollars for games that today might look primitive.

The graphics weren't shit back then, and even today you could say that they are simpler but also of excellent craftsmanship.

I'm not into creating art, I hate it in fact because you can't quantify the success of produced art.

So, duh, find an artist. Ok, how? This is the part where I have no fucking idea how.

You start spamming shit like "I need an artist" online? I dunno, something for another post I guess.

I guess the most healthy thing I could do is making demos that might look like shit just to get experience so that when I get to find an artist, I have practice already.

A while back I took over responsibility for getting one of our developers up to speed, after the other guy basically gave up on him.

Management insisted that this new recruit was our guy. I was kind of going along, since I had been there during the recruits first meeting with us, and he seemed to know his stuff.

I was very wrong. He was suppose to have been working with kubernetes, but suddenly did not know what a container was. After explaining it to him, he said along the lines of “yeah, sure, I was only testing you, I know all about this”.

He did the same thing for a number of other technologies. Always said that he knew very well what it was, and that I did not need to teach him those things.

Yet, he always seemed to get stuck with basic stuff, like installing node, setting up env-vars, starting docker-containers locally and that sort of things.

I mean, it is perfectly fine to say that you don’t know. I even consider it a great answer; it shows honesty and makes me trust you more. But with this guy, it was just impossible to get him up and running, since he always “knew”, but yet always needed help.

We had to let him go. Since I had been the one who had spent most time with him, it was natural that I was to be the one to tell him. I was not looking forward to it, I’m not reallly a persons-guy. Still, I was calm and honest with him and basically told him that I had found it impossible to work with him, kind of harshly.

He then asked me if he could put me on as a reference for his future job-applications. I told him politely that I did not think that was a great idea. He asked why, I told him I would be unable to say anything that would benefit him. He then asked me to lie.

I didn’t know what to say, except for “no!”. Never saw him again after that.

Time for a REAL fucking rant.

io_uring manpages say you can set the CAP_SYS_NICE capability to allow SQPOLL to work. You can't, you still get an operation not permitted errno result.

Why? I checked, it says 5.10 mainline is required. Pretty sure I just manually downloaded and installed the Deb's myself. uname reports that I am at 5.10. So what gives?

Maintainer submitted a patch because they fucked up and made the *actual* capability check look for what's basically root permissions (CAP_SYS_ADMIN... c'mon...) and is now trying to rectify a glaring security shortcoming.

Patch hasn't been accepted or even addressed yet but they already updated the manpages with the estimated mainline kernel release as if it had made it into the release candidate. Manpages have made it into latest debs but the actual change has not.

Where the fuck is the Linus Torvalds that would ream the fuck out of shitty developers doing shitty things? The political correctness climate has discouraged such criticism now and the result... this. This fucking mess, where people are allowed to cut corners and get away with it because it would hurt their feelings when faced with pressure.

I'm not just guessing either. The maintainer has already said some of the "tone" of criticisms hurt his feelings. Yes, sorry, but when you claim 90% speedup over a typical epoll application using your new magical set of syscalls, and nobody can even get 1-2% speedup on a similar machine, people are going to be fucking skeptical. Then when you lower it to 60% because you originally omitted a bunch of SECURITY RELATED AND CORRECTNESS CHECKING CODE, we're going to call you the fuck out for fudging numbers.

Trying to maintain the equivalent of academic integrity within the computer science field is an exercise of insanity. You'd be fired and shunned from publishing in journals if you pulled that shit in ANY OTHER FUCKING FIELD, but because the CS scene is all about jerking each other off at every corner because the mean people keep saying mean things on Twitter and it hurts your feelings therefore we're all allowed to contribute subpar work and be protected from criticisms when others realize it's subpar.

These aren't mistakes anymore, it's clear you're just trying to farm clout at Facebook - maybe even FOR Facebook.

Fuck you. Do it right, the first time. Sick of shitty code being OK all of a sudden.

!dev

A child's mind is fascinating.

I remember how it felt being a kid, just deliriously happy.

Things were magical, mystical and happy.

I knew the world wasn't perfect, I knew bad things happened to good people.

But a kid's mind is so powerful that it can fill in the blanks with the most cheerful and optimistic perspectives.

And at some point in my childhood I was exposed to videogames, and that kinda took me down fantasy lane even further.

I was extremely young and barely retaining any memories when I was exposed to my first console, a famicom.

I have a somewhat vivid memory of my mind being blown away for the first time by watching my brother play New Ghostbusters II for NES.

From then on, we never stopped and played several console and dos/pc games.

When I was 10, someone from the neighborhood brought in a couple of floppys with Pokemon Yellow.

"What? Pokemon? How the fuck is that even possible? This is a pc, not a gameboy".

I didn't know at the time what an emulator was, but I was super fucking stoked to be able to play that.

My dad had a 1 gb laptop from work that he didn't use, so I hoarded that shit, and I would get to bed and play nearly everyday.

The experience was surreal. I was doing pc gaming... not on a chair, on a fucking bed, and I was playing a gameboy game... on a pc.

It was so intense to me, that even after more than 2 decades of that time in my life, I still remember how it feels like.

Like, you know how you can "feel" things if you think about them? like for example if you think about the taste of chicken, you can somehow feel it for a second.

Well I have like an actual physical sensation linked to that experience but I can't explain it at all, because it's just a sensation.

I think people usually say they feel that way, for example, about the PSX (usually refered to as ps one) loading screen. I experienced that too but when I was 12, so it was not as intense (it does make me feel the fuzzies though).

I also remember other things with very high detail, like the texture of my bed cover, the weather, mom cooking, the clunky shape of the laptop, the way I carelessly stored it above a pile of magazines, etc.

I rememeber ofc how it felt looking at the game sprites, interacting with NPCs, and the goddamn fucking glorious music.

It was dreamy.

Years and years later, I grew up and I stopped living in fantasy world and became more aware of the grim aspects of life my younger self was sugarcoating.

So I tried to play pokemon again, again and again, and no matter how hard I tried to revive that euphoria, I could not never do it.

I started to get annoyed at the game.

"Come oooon, I did the tutorial already, let me skip this.
This pokemon is useless, why am I even training it.
Fuck, I'm tired of grinding"

At some point I accepted that the feeling would never return, and that it would just live in my memory.

Ironically, I can recall that memory and how it felt anytime I want to.

And I can actually still feel it, and throughtout these years, it has never wore down.

And eventually I learned how to play pokemon and enjoy it:

I read tier lists at smogon online and just catch and train the pokemons that are higher on the list, which is how i got to beat yellow in like 3 days.

(This is nothing compared to what speedrunners do, but much better than the weeks it had taken me in the past).

That served as an important lesson that when a kid plays a game, his mind is also the game at the same time, filling the blanks with its imagination.

A very similar experience happened to me with harvest moon, which is the precursor of stardew valley.

and that game is faaar more emotional: you talk to people, overtime you befriend them and they open up, you meet a girl, you marry her, have a kid

you get farm animals, you brush them, they become happy

you get attached

that game was also so powerful in me that in all naiveness I thought I wanted to be a farmer.

Eventually I grew up and hit puberty and from then on, I focused more on competitive games, like smash bros, cs and tf2.

and i dunno how to end a post so eat my fucking nuts

TL;DR Pluralsight should be ashamed for taking 299 USD a year and writing some very low-quality quizzes.

I've always heard that Pluralsight is a great platform having some high quality courses, so I chose it as a benefit, as our company was giving us some budget for learning purposes. I've paid (or rather the company did it in the end) 299 USD for this year, which, I guess is not much for US standards, but it is a lot for Eastern European standards.

I didn't actually get to the point of watching any of the courses, but I started to use a feature called "Stack up", which is a long series of questions in a specific theme, like Java, Kotlin, C++, etc., accessible once a day. I must say, I'm amazed by the fact, that people pay quite a great amount of money and they get something so poorly made with a lot of errors and stupid questions.

Take the question from the included image for example. Not only that the 2 possible answers are repeated (and thus I failed to select the correct one from 2 equal answers), but the supposedly correct answer is also missing some type specifications. No Java compiler will compile it this way as far as I know. There would be at least 3 ways to fix it.

Then there is today's gem (should be included as first comment) as well, where the answer is wrong in both Chrome 96, Firefox 95 and Node v10. Heck, THIS IS one of the reasons why you should never use `var` in your JavaScript code, but always `let` and `const`!

So the courses on Pluralsight might be good, but I would be ashamed, if I were to release something like this. People might actually try to solidify their knowledge by solving these quizzes but instead of learning something useful, they will be left with some bullshit. I just don't get how could they release a feature with so much incorrect information and I am kind of disappointed, even if I didn't try the courses yet.

So... Heard back from a recruiter today. Lovely lass.

I’d passed over a submission for her tech demo.

The brief was basically just to create a small simple module that calculates shit, nae effort.

But, when the recruiter had me on the phone she said “I know it’s a silly small module but try and run it up like you would a production ready app”.

The job spec and recruiter were keen on me demonstrating TDD, not specific on js version, final runtime, etc. The job was a senior spec at a higher salary range. So it warranted some effort, and demonstrating more than a simple module.

“Okay, cool, nae bother, let’s crack on.”

The feedback in the response from the dev today:
“He’s over-engineered tests, build...”

SUCK MY LEFT TESTICLE YOU FUCKWIT.

Talk to your recruiters, not me.

The feedback included a phrase I never hope to hear from a developer I work with:
“Tests are good but...” 😞

It was a standard 98% test suite from an RGR cycle, no more or less than I’d expect in prod.

The rest of the feedback was misguided or plain wrong. It was useful to see because I know now when they say they have “high standards” they mean: we listen to the dude who put the factory pattern in a JS brief.

Oh shit also: “someone’s done chmod 777” was in there as a sarcastic comment in the feedback. It was his fucking unarchive tool 😞

My response was brief and polite: “cheers for the consideration, all the best, James”

It’s honestly not worth warning them. Or, asking why they’d criticise something they’d asked me to do.

If you want a shitty js module, ask for a shitty js module and no more.

Am I the only one who's getting more and more aggrevated about how the large youtube channels misinform and make out VPN providers (I am looking at you, Nord VPN, mostly) as the messiahs of the internet? How they protect our data that would otherwise be in incredible "danger" otherwise?

I understand they need clients, and I know most of the YT channels probably do not know better, but... This is misinformation at best, and downright false advertising at the worst...

"But HTTP-only websites still exist!" - yes, but unlike the era before Lets Encrypt, they are a minority. Most of the important webpages are encrypted.

"Someone could MITM their connection and present a fake certificate!" - And have a huge, red warning about the connection being dangerous. If at that point, the user ignores it, I say its their fault.

Seriously... I don't know if Nord gives their partners a script or not... But... I am getting super sick of them. And is the main reason why I made my own VPN at home...

#heavyrant

AGAIN !!! MICROSOFT (MAY GOD SEND THEM TO HELL) GAVE A DEADLY BLOW TO SOMETHING I USED TO LOVE !!

This new UI update is just aweful, i mean, i love github, i work using github, i do so many things with it, or should i say that i used to ....

This update seems so un-natural, it just doesn't fit.

Why would the collabs be shown so obviously ??
Why would the main window be so narrow while the rest is widescreen ????

My eyes get tired so quickly when i use it now.

It used to be something nice, easy to use, but now it is more like a social media than a professional coding tool.

I HATE YOU MISCROSOT WHAT EVER YOU TOUCH TURNS TO BE A SHIT HOLE

So, someone is trying to catfish me in some social media.
And I can make a few guesses about who it might be. Or maybe I'm being paranoid and all the accounts contacting me randomly, are just spam bots.

But this isn't the first time. From a hateful ex, to someone I turned down because I had zero feelings for, to even random stalkers who found me online and thought that I was the best choice for obsessing over, I've seen different types of online ghosts.

Like... why is it that it takes so much for some people to be decent? Why can't you just say it to my face (aka directly), get your answer, and then fuck off? And if you're actually obsessing, it is not my problem. See a fucking therapist.

Anywho, aside from the wish to be able to occasionally deliver an online slap, and occasionally wishing that everyone on the internet had an ID to be found IRL, I would like for internet to be a less hateful/harassing/terrorizing/bullying/discriminating place. I like internet. I have so many awesome friends on the internet.

I just needed to rant about it so it doesn't weigh on my mind. Now I'm gonna go back to ignoring them and living my own life peacefully. I hope y'all have a good day. 🙂

Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

!dev

I have a couple of thoughts about social justice controversies from these last years.

I think it's hard to have a good opinion about these events for several reasons.

One reason is that finding good information in 2019 is very hard.

Revenue based sites (thus unneutral) dominate the search results. You search about something and you find thousands of sites basically saying the same thing (because they copy each other).

That's why the existence of a free and open search engine is so important, so it's easier to find neutral hence good information on which to base your opinions, but they are prohibitively big for small groups to build.

Another reason is that controversies generate shock and shock curtails rational thinking. Maybe that's how the primitive brain works?

I'm not much of a scholar to feel confident to say that, but it's so recurrent that it's not too much of a wild guess.

When a controversy happens, a natural reaction is to pick a side. This means that:
a) we assume that there are only 2 sides, and
b) we must pick one of them

So, maybe the human is a bad politician by nature?

Also, because of the shock controversies generate, peaceful dialogue is very rare.

I have yet to see peaceful dialogue online about what patriarchy means to feminists and a lot of other terms they use.

I don't care much about feminists that vandalize or interrupt talks (yelling over someone else is abuse in my opinion).

But for the rest of them, I think discussing their ideas would be good.

I say this because most feminist discourse I see online is not open. Or maybe there are such instances but the web is so big that it's hard to find such instances.

I think some part of the modern feminist doctrine is bullshit, and some part is true.

I for one hate when some men I know in life expect their wives to be their cooks+cleaners (unless they want to do that, willingly). Personally, I'd encourage my wife to get a job (rightfully so, not just to meet some minority quota in some company).

I don't mind either calling a trans person the pronoun she wants.

But other ideas are awful, like the idea that meritocracy is patriarchy, so you need to force minorities to meet a proportionate quota. That's terrible reasoning.

Or the excessive self appreciation culture, like saying to yourself "you are pretty, you are beautiful, you are perfect". I think that grows arrogance and black-or-white thinking.

And some other ideas as well.

I guess the same you can say about any doctrine with different degrees. Some part is bullshit, some part isn't.

Some right wing people hate everyone who isn't white by default, but some want to have more immigration control.

I sure don't like the experiment of separating children from families like the current us govt did, but I wouldn't be happy either to know that by '99 50% of gangs members in the us were hispanic.

With this, I'm not going to say "embrace everyone's ideas" like an idiot. I hate when people do that. It's a stupid and weak reaction to radicalism.

In fact I think the way you fight radicalism and bad doctrines is that you listen to them and maintain good dialogue and counterargue in a respectful but insightful manner.

Making snide remarks, insulting or trolling won't change anyone's mind. That is just throwing fire to the fire.

In fact, when someone gets harassed because of something they believe in, usually it results in even more adherence to their beliefs, because of the usual assumption that success or goodness is full of strife.

So by telling a "sjw" or kkk member that they are idiots over twitter, you are in fact making them stronger believers in their doctrine.

Think of Daryl Davis, a black guy that made 200 members leave the kkk. How? He didn't tell them they were assholes, he somehow made friends with them.

I feel bad now because I've been trolling new devrant users a lot because of how they worsen the quality of the site, but maybe I should tell them that they are ruining the site somehow in a nice way and maybe they'll listen? I dunno...

Project manager, who i've complained in the past is neglecting critical things that he doesn't want to do, decided today to cancel our weekly planning meeting, to have the below conversation with me 1:1. Its very long, but anyone who has the will to get through it ... please tell me it's not just me. I'm so bewildered and angry.

Side note: His solution to the planning meeting not taking place ... to just not have one and asked everyone to figure it out themselves offline, with no guidance on priorities.

Conversation:

PM: I need to talk to you about some of phrasing you use during collaboration. It's coming across slightly offensive, or angry or something like that.

Me: ok, can you give me an example?

PM: The ticket I opened yesterday, where you closed it with a comment something along the lines of "as discussed several times before, this is an issue with library X, can't be fixed until Y ...".

"As discussed several times" comes across aggressive.

Me: Ok, fair enough, I get quite frustrated when we are under a crunch, working long hours, and I have to keep debugging or responding to the same tickets over and over. I mean, like we do need to solve this problem, I don't think its fair that we just keep ignoring this.

PM: See this is the problem, you never told me.

Me: ... told you what?

PM: That this is a known issue and not to test it.

Me: ..... i'm sorry ..... I did, that was the comment, this is the 4th ticket i've closed about it.

PM: Right but when you sent me this app, you never said "don't test this".

Me: But I told you that, the last 3 times that it won't be in until feature X, which you know is next month.

PM: No, you need to tell me on each internal release what not to test.

Me: But we release multiple times per week internally. Do you really need me to write a big list of "still broken, still broken, still broken, still broken"?

PM: Yes, how else will I know?

Me: This is documented, the last QA contractor we had work for us, wrote a lot of this down. Its in other tickets that are still open, or notes on test cases etc. You were tagged in all of these too. Can you not read those? and not test them unless I say I've fixed them?

PM: No, i'm only filling for QA until we hire a full time. Thats QA's job to read those and maintain those documents.

Me: So you want me to document for you every single release, whats already documented in a different place?

PM: ok we'll come back to this. Speaking of hiring QA. You left a comment on the excel spreadsheet questioning my decision, publicly, thats not ok.

Me: When I asked why my top pick was rejected?

PM: Yes. Its great that you are involved in this, but I have to work closely with this person and I said no, is that not enough?

Me: Well you asked me to participate, reviewing resumes's and interviewing people. And I also have to work extremely close with this person.

PM: Are you doubting my ability to interview or filter people?

Me: ..... well a little bit yeah. You asked me to interview your top pick after you interviewed her and thought she was great. She was very under qualified. And the second resume you picked was missing 50% of the requirements we asked for ... given those two didn't go well, I do think its fair to ask why my top pick was rejected? ... even just to know the reason?

PM: Could you not have asked publicly? face to face?

Me: you tagged me on a google sheet, asking me to review a resume, and rather than tag you back on 2 rows below ... you want me to wait 4 days to ask you at our next face to face? (which you just cancelled for this meeting)

PM: That would have been more appropriate

Me: ..... i'm sorry, i don't want to be rude but thats ridiculous and very nit pick-y. You asked my opinion on one row, I asked yours on another. To say theres anything wrong with that is ridiculous

PM: Well we are going to call another team meeting and discuss all this face to face then, because this isn't working. We need to jump to this other call now, lets leave it here.

!dev

I need to rant about something that has been on my mind lately.

Someone, actually. Friend/romantic interest of mine, from a few years back.

NGL, I liked him. A lot more than I should have. The man had his own issues, but I refused to tolerate his poisonous behavior. Truth be told, didn't want to hate him, even though he was trying his best to get me there. And so, one day I ended up blocking him after a fight. A few months back, I tried to reconnect. Same behavior. But this time around he did say that he was done with me. So instead of sitting through the torture of his "reasons why you suck" presentation, I blocked him again.

Now, I hope he's doing well. Never wanted anything but happiness for him. And as much as I miss him, I think it's better for him to stay away from me too. I mean, if I trigger him that badly, maybe I shouldn't be around him anyways.

Nowadays, I'm staying away from someone else again. Similar scenario. Reason being that I was actually being mistreated, and again I refuse to be tortured to the point of hating the object of my affection.

I wonder if I get attracted to the torture. I'm okay with dying alone tbh, what I'm not okay with is falling for those who don't want my love and much rather kill it.

... Actually, at this point in life I don't even want to fall for anyone anymore. (That is not the same thing as dating someone I like tho. That, I would do) The darker side of me says those who I fall for are all the same type of disappointment, but the brighter side says that I am enough, complete as is, and not everyone needs someone else. idk maybe I'm being a tad narcissistic, or hyper-independant, or flakey and afraid of attachment. But that first friend occasionally pops up in my thoughts, and reminds me that not everyone appreciates when you don't let someone make you hate them.

Oh well. *sigh*

tldr:
first year in college we programmed 24 hrs straight to fix somebody's mess before the deadline. Decided not to screw him over, instead he claimed to have done everything and we failed the assignment.

Long version:
var group= new[]{"Mike", "Gavin", "Gus", "I", "Ben" };
var client = "Jack"';

First year of college we had an assignment to make a web program for somebody.
Ben wanted to join our group and he already knew a client so we let him join.

After joining Ben wanted to be project lead, but we already decided Mike based on his experience.
Ben claimed to be much better in every way than Mike at and kept coming with stuff the following weeks why we should make him project lead. He kept pointing out when Mike did something wrong and he even came with an audio file where he clearly made jack say that he wanted Ben to be project lead .
After that we were all a bit pissed and told him that he should get it in his head that he was not going to be project lead and just start working on his part of the assignment.

We also found out that Ben was a documentation addict, what we could write in a small paragraph, he wrote a whole page about it. No joke, I rewrote a page of his in 5-6 rows with the same information in it.
No problem you thing, wrong! Because of this he kept bothering us arguing and claiming that our documentation was wrong because it was to short.

In the week of the deadline we asked Ben if he was also done, and told us that he was done for a while now.

The day before the deadline we came to school thinking we only had to do some merging and finishing up documentation.
Then we found out that Ben has almost nothing, and what he had the IDE was screaming that it was incorrect, spaces in Id's and css class names for instance. A really good programmer, my ass!
We were so pissed off at this point, but we had 24 hrs and needed to come up with a plan to fix it.

We decided that Mike and I were going to fix Ben his shit in the coming 24 hrs and Ben was going to make our last bit of documentation because we would not have the time for that, Especially if we had to argue with him like we had to do for each bit of documentation. Gus did not have time and Gavin could not program on his own yet, he wanted to help, but helping him help us would cost more time than we had.

We all went home after that and Mike and I started to program 24 hours straight while in a Skype call, making what Ben had 2 months for. Shortly before the deadline Mike looked at our finishing up documentation received from Ben and told me it was "Okay" and zipped everything up and uploaded it to school with a few minutes to spare.

After that we thought everything was good, we made Ben's part work and delivered it in time. We also decided not to throw Ben under the bus, because this would hurt all our grades because we did not work good as a group since we should have noticed it earlier.

A few weeks go by till the assessment.
The assessment start with asking if we want individual grades or as a group when you all think you did equal amount. We choose as a group, because if we chose individual not only Ben but also Gavin would get a lower grade and we did not think that was fair because he tried so hard.

We demo the product and the teachers are positive. When the teachers start about the documentation, the first thing they tell is that they found something interesting in the documentation, and they read it to us:

"I, Ben, have made all the documentation because my group did not want to."

That was so far from the truth, we all did make our documentation about the parts we made. Yes he did do overall a little bit more because every single bit of documentation we had to argue with him, so every time he volunteers to make it, we would all agree. And he made Mike's and i's last bit of documentation.

Telling the teachers on that point would not have mattered, it would only have hurt is in another way, so we did not and all failed the assignment. And we all felt like to strangle him.
This is now a few years back, but i still want too.

Anything I (am able to) build myself.
Also, things that are reasonably standardized. So you probably won't see me using a commercial NAS (needing a web browser to navigate and up-/download my files, say what?) nor would I use something like Mega, despite being encrypted. I don't like lock-in into certain clients to speak some proprietary "secure protocol". Same reason why I don't use ProtonMail or that other one.. Tutanota. As a service, use the standards that already exist, implement those well and then come offer it to me.

But yeah. Self-hosted DNS, email (modified iRedMail), Samba file server, a blog where I have unlimited editing capabilities (God I miss that feature here on devRant), ... Don't trust the machines nor the services you don't truly own, or at least make an informed decision about them. That is not to say that any compute task should be kept local such as search engines or AI or whatever that's best suited for centralized use.. but ideally, I do most of my computing locally, in a standardized way, and in a way that I completely control. Most commercial cloud services unfortunately do not offer that.

Edit: Except mail servers. Fuck mail servers. Nastiest things I've ever built, to the point where I'd argue that it was wrong to ever make email in the first place. Such a broken clusterfuck of protocols, add-ons (SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc), reputation to maintain... Fuck mail servers. Bloody soulsuckers those are. If you don't do system administration for a living, by all means do use the likes of ProtonMail and Tutanota, their security features are nonstandard but at least they (claim to) actually respect your privacy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'll be in touch!

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

I think I might change my middle name to "I told you so"

Couple of weeks ago I proposed integrating a daily process job into an existing WPF application (details of what+why would be too long to explain) and the manager suggested I make the changes

Me: "I can do it, but Jay has the most experience with that application. I don't have his WPF skills"
Mgr: "How hard can WPF be? If it uses the MVVM pattern, it should be a snap."
Me: "Its nearly an 8 year old WPF project with several chefs in that kitchen. I pretty sure I could figure it out, but that is a difference between 2 weeks and 2 days. Integration is pretty straight forward, Jay could probably do it in a day."
DevA: "WPF is easy. MVVM makes it even easier. I worked on the shipping app."
Me: "That's was a brand new, single page app, but yea, it should be easy."
DevB: "WPF has been around a long time and the tools have really matured. I don't understand what is so difficult."
Me: "I didn't say anything would be difficult, I know with that application, there is going to be complexity we need to figure out."
DevB: "It uses the MVVM, so all we need is the user control, a view model, controller, and its done."
DevA: "Sounds easy to me."
Mgr: "If you need more time to work on the vendor project, I'll have DevB work on the integration."

<yesterday>
Me: "How is the integration going?"
DevB: "This app is a mess. I have no idea how they got the control collections to work. If I hard-code everything, I can get it to work. This dynamic stuff is so confusing. Then there is the styling. Its uses dark mode, but no matter what I do, my controls show up in light mode."
Me: "The app uses Prism, so the control configuration is in, or around, the startup code."
DevB: "That makes sense. Will it fix the styling too?"
Me: "I have no idea. When I looked at it, some controls loaded the styles from the main resource, other's have it hard-coded. Different chefs in the kitchen, I guess. How far have you got?"
DevB: "I've created invoice button. That is as far as I got"
Me: "I'm finished with the vendor project and I'll be wrapping up the documentation today. I can try to help next week."
DevB: "Thanks. I think we might have to get Jay to help if we can't figure this out."
Me: "Good idea"

Two weeks and only a button. A button? I miss Delphi.

For the last week or so I've been writing a userbot for Telegram. Completely from scratch, plus Telethon to not reinvent the wheel entirely. I'm coming from the codebase of an existing userbot.

That userbot is written by a good friend of mine, who makes 6 figures, and whom I respect greatly. However the code is a steaming pile of shit. Now that is not his fault, he largely inherited that code too, tried to fix it, failed, gave up.

I am reimplementing it entirely. I'm only looking at the modules, trying to understand them, and copying over the necessary bits and changing them where necessary. But I've come across some nasty shit.

Userbots often edit existing messages from real Telegram clients. They're kind of like a login to your account, but with a program rather than a regular client. You send a message from a real client, it sees it and does whatever it needs to, and edits your message to give you feedback. Which is great.

However, there's no need to do simple string edits by importing "re". So why do you? Because you're an idiot, that's why. The old bot is based on Paperplane, which in turn is based on Telethon. Why do I see function calls to Telethon in some places and Paperplane in others? Because you're an idiot, that's why. Why does the dig module fail to even give correct answers? Because you know nothing about the DNS, that's why. And you didn't learn about RRs before implementing it.

And don't you tell me that this code is shit, and this bot is slow only when I run it on a fucking Pentium. I run this shit on an i7 and CPU isn't even the issue - memory, disk and such are. If you had any clue whatsoever about efficiency, you would've known because it's blatantly obvious. There's a reason why my machines rarely go past 5% CPU utilization. It's the fastest component in the entire fucking system.

When users come and say.. hmm this application of yours, it consumes a lot of memory. It takes a long time to do X and Y and I don't quite understand why, it seems illogical. Then maybe you should go look at your code, like you would look at yourself in the mirror. And then you fucking go fix it so that I don't have to. You're an engineer just like I am. And I am not even a dev proper - I'm a sysadmin by trade. Why should I have to fix your shit for you?

Area of focus: Native iOS dev

Why: Spent years trying hybrid tools, dealing with the most ridiculous errors, bugs and issues you can begin to comprehend and then ... something magical happened. I got a book on Objective-c, learned a little, tried a simple app ... and it worked ... like properly worked, and on all the devices without taking half the RAM.

I'll say that again as I don't think it landed. In Objective-c, I got no issues where only the CEO's phone + OS version meant I couldn't load a map and a pin (looking at you titanium!!!)

In Objective-c, I wasn't promised storyboards and autolayout, only to find out they are completely different, and may god help you trying to google the issues, as the only ones to show up would be the native tools (looking at you Xamarin)

In Objective-c, my app doesn't instantly consume 125mb of RAM to load a fucking webview (looking at you ... well nearly every other hybrid tool)

... it just works. Then Swift came along and things only got better.

How do you deal with someone like this?

I've got this dev at my workplace that is terrible to work with, he's 2 main reasons why I say this:
1. He has no clue about team work, every piece of code he writes is written as if he is the only person that has to ever touch that
2. He's overtly protective and opinionated on things that make no sense, they're non standard "rules" that he sets and enforces by replacing others code with his own (often times you see quite large PRs and after inspection you realize he rewrote parts of code to follow his style). These "rules" also take up a really long time to follow and would make any actually experienced developer question this guy's knowledge, one example of this is where he repeats the same code over multiple components for "encapsulation reasons" and God forbid you create a global helper of some sort, he'll straight up remove it the next chance he gets. Another example is that all his components or utilities live inside 1 base directory, so you have roughly 300+ components in a /components directory, all with non standard names so you can't tell which is related to which.

I hate working with this person, it's annoying and it also sucks because he's sort of a more "senior" Dev so managers take his side most of the time.

Me: We have a new research project for you. We need you to test these 2 new services, see how they will fit into the new application, look at alternatives if necessary etc. At the end we need you to write a report with your findings, showing how you would integrate them to achieve X, Y and Z, and how much it would cost each month.

Dev: sounds good, I'll come back to you when I have it.

*2 and a half weeks later*

Document paragraph 1: The new language translation service doesn't support the languages we need.

Document paragraph 2: Here's my proposal for integrating the new language translation service.

*review*

Me: So I had a look at the doc and it says it doesn't support the languages.

Dev: yeah unfortunately not.

Me: Ok, so when you discovered that, why didn't you look for an alternative? Or come back to me and say it's not going to work.

Dev: I dunno, I thought you'd want to see the rest of the research first.

Me: ... not if we know for 100% undeniable fact that it will never function.

Dev: Ah ok, I didn't think of that. I'll do that next time, don't worry.

... aw how sweet, he thinks there will be a next time. Poor guy.

Alright. This is going to be long and incoherent, so buckle up. This is how I lost my motivation to program or to do anything really.

Japan is apparently experiencing a shortage of skilled IT workers. They are conducting standardized IT skill tests in 7 Asian countries including mine. Very few people apply and fewer actually pass the exam. There are exams of different levels that gives you better roles in the IT industry as you pass them. For example, the level 2 or IT Fundamental Engineering Exam makes you an IT worker, level 3 = capable of working on your own...so on.
I passed level 1 and came in 3rd in my country (there were only 78 examinees lol). Level 2 had 2 parts. The theoretical mcq type exam in the morning and the programming mcq in the afternoon. They questions describe a scenario/problem, gives you code that solves it with some parts blanked out.

I passed the morning exam and not the afternoon. As a programmer I thought I'd be good at the afternoon exam as it involves actual code. Anyway, they give you 2 more chances to pass the afternoon exam, failing that, you'll have to take both of them the next time. Someone who has passed 1 part is called a half-passer and I was one.

A local company funded by both JICA and my government does the selection and training for the Japanese companies. To get in you have to pass a written exam(write code/pseudocode on paper) and pass the final interview in which there are 2 parts - technical interview and general interview.

I went as far as the interview. Didn't do too good in the technical interview. They asked me how would I find the lightest ball from 8 identical balls using a balance only twice. You guys probably already know the solution. I don't have much theoritical knowledge. I know how to write code and solve problems but don't know formal name of the problem or the algorithm.

On to the next interview. I see 2 Japanese interviewers and immediately blurt out konichiwa! The find it funny. Asked me about my education. Say they are very impressed that self taught and working. The local HR guy is not impressed. Asks me why I left university and why never tried again. Goes on about how the dean is his friend and universites are cheap. foryou.jpg

The real part. So they tell me that Japanese companies pay 250000/month, I will have to pay 60% income tax, pay for my own accommodation, food, transportation cost etc. Hella sweet deal. Living in Japan! But I couldn't get in because the visa is only given to engineers. Btw I'm not looking to invade Japan spread my shitskin seed and white genocide the japs. Just wanted to live in another country for a while and learn stuff from them.

I'll admit I am a little salty and probably will remain salty forever. But this made me lose all interest in programming. It's like I don't belong. A dropout like me should be doing something lowly. Maybe I should sell drugs or be a pimp or something.

But sometimes I get this short lived urge to make something brilliant and show them that people like me are capable of doing good things. Fuck, do I have daddy issues?

The whole company [cult]ure bullshit has really gotten out of hand. When management sets new deadlines that only put stress on the devs then decide to have some cringe AF company bonding soirée in the middle of the work day who benefits from this? The rebranded HR platoon thinks all employees want to participate in basically mandatory chum-it-up gatherings. Don’t get me wrong I love to party and enjoy myself, but I go to work to do just that. Work. And when other departments whose main responsibility is setting up events for the technical staff, they never seem to consider these work loads or what other people actually want. It might seem all fun and dandy on the surface but when you hear tales of people talking in the closed offices about so-and-so because they aren’t reflecting the cultural values, it starts to seem very fucking problematic. Like why would anyone ever say anything when you would probably just get the boot for just being too different, even though all this sits on top of some guise of, “a diverse work environment”. All in all I hope this [cult]ure shit summers down sooner than later. And I’m in a right to work state, so transparency be damned.