Boss: I need you to start on this new project, how long will it take?

Me: well, hard to say with no specs whatsoever...

Boss: just your best guess

Me: 4 to 6 month I guess?

Boss: so 3 months it is. When can you start?

Me: no specs, sir...and I said 4 to 6

Boss: the specs are almost ready, I know you can simplify it

Me: ...

Boss: just start with the basic infrastructure already

(4 months later)

Boss: here you are the specs, they might change a little in behaviour and design, but all the main stuff is here

(Hands me a A3 with a total of 21 pictures in InDesign)

Me: o....Kay. what happens when I click here?

Boss: oh, we should still talk about the app workflow, I'll get you updated

(2 weeks and 16 total rewrites of the "specs" later)

Boss: you told me it was a 2 months job, why aren't you finished yet? We must deploy in 3 weeks!

Me: ...

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

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

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

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

I email the woman (paraphrased):

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

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

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

So, since I hear from a lot of people (on here and irl) that Linux has a 'very high learning curve', let me share my experiences with the first time my dad touched Linux (Elementary OS) without me interfering at all! (keep in mind that he is very a-technical)

*le me boots the system* (I already did setup a user account for him and gave him the password).

Dad: *enters password and presses enter*
Me: "Hmm that went faster than expected."
Dad: "Uhm I know how to login son, it's not that hard and pretty obvious".
Me: "Alright, why don't you try to open up the default word documents editor on here! I'll be right back!"
Me: *Goes away and returns after a minute*.
Dad: *already a few test sentences typed in LibreOffice writer* it's going pretty well :)!
Me: "Oo how did you find that?!"
Dad: "Well, there's a thingy that says 'applications' so I clicked in and found it in the "Office" section, do you think I am blind or something?!"
Me: 😐. uhm no but I just didn't think you'd find it that quickly. Now try to install Chromium browser! *thinking: he'll fail this one for sure* I'll be right back :).
Me: *returns again after a minute or so*
Dad: *already searching for stuff through Chromium*
Me: "wait, how the hell did you do that so quickly, it's not the easiest thingy for most people".
Dad: "Jesus, it's not that hard! I went to the application browsing thingy, typed 'software' and then a sorta software store icon showed up so I clicked it and it opened a windows with a search bar saying something like 'search for applications/software'. clicked in it, typed 'chromium', saw it coming up, there was a very clear 'install' button, it asked for my password, I put it in and after a little it gave a notification that it was installed. Then I went to that application browsing thingy again and typed Chromium. Then I hit enter because it selected an icon called chromium...."
Me: O.o. Okay this is going very good, now open an email client and login to your email address!
Dad: *goes to application browsing thingy, types 'email', evolution icon shows up, dad clicks it, email address setup steps show up and dad follows them quickly. After about a minute, everything is setup.

I expected this to be a hard process for someone who dealt with Windows his entire life but damn, I underestimated it.
Asked him if he found it easy/what he liked about it:
"Well, it's very clear where I can find everything, default browser/email/word document editor programs are easy to find and that's about all I need so yeah, great system!"

I am proud of you, dad!

I put a lot of work into trying to explain to you muggles what I do all day in a way you can understand (it's hard, trust me) and you still reject it as boring nerd crap. I'm sick of it! What if you told me working at that restaurant is "putting water on plates, wiping it off, and putting meat and cheese between slices of bread" and I said "wtf is that, and who cares?" Wouldn't that hurt your feelings, that I didn't even attempt to make a connection with you, friend? That I didn't even attempt to step outside my experience to meet yours? Isn't it equally insulting how far you have to dumb it down, just for me to lose interest entirely? And yes, I know that's not your specific task. That only proves my point further.

And why, exactly? Conceptually, you handle pre-digested poop all day.
_I teach plastic to think._ Sometimes it even thinks better than you do.
How is my job less interesting?
And what's more, why does EVERYONE seem to think so?

How do you expect people like me to keep your iPhones, bank accounts, and self-driving cars working if you alienate us like an alternate species for building those things? I mean really. You people treat us with a disinterest harmonious with homophobia. "Don't ask, don't tell." Except you do ask. And then you condescend as if working with my brain makes me less worthy of your attention than your exciting minimum-wage restaurant job.

Have fun with that, by the way.

Oh, and you're welcome for <object I fixed that wasn't really broken>. Maybe next time, just google it.
I know you won't.

Meeting with smooth suit guy:

"So, our company has pivoted"

I hate everything about this guy, not having slept well at all, I fucking snapped:

"Pivoted? Oh wow, what a wonderfully refined word to describe that your asinine business model smacked flat into the mud, that your obtuse bubble of vague ideas popped and your childish dreams of piles of undeserved gold got caught up by the hard reality that your product does not add any tangible value -- yet you tricked your sheepish retarded investors once again to fall for a new hype-filled pitch deck? Congratulations. At least you probably snort enough coke to keep believing in yourself..."

The guy nervously wiped his nose, stuttered, and walked off looking angry and a little confused.

So it turns out, my boss is apparently the major "sheepish retarded investor" in this company.

Today I got a mail from him. I expected fire and fury, nuclear ICBMs crashing into my desk.

"Thanks for your feedback, this is why I invite you to meetings. Could you take a look at their new pitch slides and preliminary API docs for me?"

Biggest hurdle: torn between having boobs and missing an arm. I swear some people are under the assumption the brain is in the arm.

I am fully capable of building your network, resolving your outage due to your faulty code, can even tell you how many users your database can support at once. I don't need arms for that. Nor do my boobs distract me that badly.

"but men are going to make your life so hard" yup. And that's true no matter where i go

"all that typing with one arm can't be good for your back" welp. Find me a job that doesn't require a computer. Or manual labor. If you think typing will fuck me up, that's DEFINITELY out of the equation

"you're too pretty, there's no way this can make sense" dafuq you just say?!?!

"why don't you just stay home on disability, I'm sure you qualify, you wouldn't need to work" I'd rather be a fucking trophy wife if I'm staying at home. Fuck that.

And many more.

Sometimes they're fun. Give me more dumb arguments to counter? ;)

Friend: Hey, can you fix my laptop? The hard drive is almost full.

Me: (Looking through his folders) Maybe it's because of this. Why do you have 3000+ files in your downloads folder? Maybe I should delete some of this.

Friend: No no, please don't touch the downloads folder, I have some very important documents there.

Me: Why don't you move them to a separate folder then? You should organize the ones you actually need and delete the rest. This folder is a complete mess.

Friend: No no, the problem is not the downloads folder, there must be something else. Can't you just uninstall some programs to free up space?

Me: I could, but I don't know which ones you actually use.

Friend: What? You should know!! You studied computer science for this!!

Me: First of all, there is not a single class in the whole 4 years of university called "How to uninstall programs and free up space on 128GB hard drives of shitty €400 computers". Second of all, I don't know why you were expecting me to find a magic button on your laptop that immediately frees up all the space in a hard drive without actually deleting anything. That's not how computers work, you know.

Friend: Hey if you didn't want to help me you could have said so in the first place.

Me: FML

We were talking about harddrives at work when someone was wondering if filling them with helium would make them spin faster... Then imagination took over!

"But helium balloons float, right... So would helium filled hard drives float..? Probably not due to weight but imagine dropping a hard drive and seeing it float towards the ceiling.."

"John, the delivery guy has a box with new harddrives downstairs, could you go get them?
*shouts* John did you get them? Just don't open the box outside!! No, no, NOOO DON'T OPEN IT OUTSIDE! JOHN, THE HARDDRIVES, BE CAREFUL, DON'T OPEN THE BOX OUTSI.....
*harddrives floating by the window into the air*
NOO, JOHN, WHAT DID YOU DO?!

"*walks into the office, harddrives floating against the ceiling* goddammit John, not again"

"John, why are you putting one kilometer long cables on those harddrives?
*John let's them float into the air towards the clouds*
We offer cloud storage!"

(We have a usual office building ceiling)
"John, I need a 1tb harddrive, where are those?
Uhm... C12!

*takes a ladder and walks towards c12 to pluck one from the ceiling*"

😆

Not a specifically dev related story, but absolutely rant worthy.

Today I was working from home, and my wife called me to tell me that some awful person had thrown a young cat into the dumpster at her work.

To that person - you are a scumbag. You’re lucky no one left you alone in a hot car as a kid, let alone a dumpster. Seriously, why? Why is it so hard to take it to a shelter?

Anyway - I went and bought a whole bunch of cat stuff - I grew up with cats but I’ve never had one on my own. We’re at the vet now. I think we’ll name her Curry (after Haskell Curry, and lovely spicy dishes).

Why is it so hard to code when you bleed. T_T
I just can't.

Storytime!

This customer comes in and practically throws a computer on the counter.

Customer: This computer isn't working. I've ran the diagnostics and it says it's software. *places a dvd case with a 32 bit Windows 7 disk in it on the counter* It had Windows 10 on it, but I want Windows 7 on it.

Me: Well, you may have issues with the drivers if you put Windows 7 on it--

Customer: I don't care, I just want Windows 7.

Me: You SHOULD care. That means no wifi, no display, no mouse... Windows 7 doesn't like Windows 10 hardware.

Customer: Then... check to see Windows 7 compatibility!

Me: Alright.... *makes notes to check for Windows 7 compatibility*

Me: So has this Windows 7 been used before?

Customer: Yes, it has.

Me: On how many computers?

Customer: I've installed it on two computers and it works just fine.

Me: That's weird because Windows license keys are for one computer only. Are both of them connected to the internet?

Customer: Yes.

Me: Well, okay then... *finishes up ticket*

Customer: I work in this field and I just don't understand why they don't come with the disks anymore. How much is a Windows 10 disk?

Me: *gives price*

Customer: And do you have any?

Me: Let me check *I go to where they are, find some and come back out*

Me: Unfortunately we're out at the moment and would have to special order some back in.

Customer: OK. So then how much to fix this computer?

Me: *price of installing Windows and backing up data*

Customer: That's halfway to the price of a new one of these!

Me: Well yes, an HP at Walmart... But you do have that option if you want to take it.

Customer: Well, why does it cost that much?

Me: Well, it's $labor1 to install Windows, $labor2 to do some basic setup and drivers, and $labor3 to backup and restore data.

Customer: Oh, well I don't want data.

Me: Okay, well then it would be $total - $labor3

Customer: ...Okay, fine

Me: *updates the ticket*

When she finally left I put it on the bench and the first message said "SMART ERROR." I then did 4 different tests that said "lol, the hard drive is failing."

If you "worked in this field," you would know that a SMART error is hard drive related.

If you worked in this field, you would know that Windows is only a 1PC license, so why are you lying about installing it with no issues on other computers?

If you worked in this field, you would know you would want a 64bit Windows on your computer.

If you worked in this field, you would know how to find a Windows 10 installation media online.

If you worked in this field, you would know that HPs are not good computers to get.

IF YOU FUCKING WORKED IN THIS FIELD YOU WOULDN'T BE SUCH A FUCKING CUNT.

Had a client on the phone with an extremely heavy Turkish (I think so, not entirely sure) accent who was hardly understandable but I kept polite and tried really hard to understand his questions.

Didn't go so well and he started to get annoyed and rude as well and asked me why I kept asking him to repeat his questions.

Told him that due to his heavy accent I had some trouble understanding him but that we'd take it slow and that I was trying my best.

He didn't take that well and called me a fucking racist (or, a 'cancer racist (dutch: 'kanker racist') but this sounds nicer).

C: (remember, heavy accent) "Ben jij kanker racist ofzo?" (are you cancer racist or something?)

Me: sorry, kan je dat herhalen? Ik verstond je niet helemaal goed door het accent, excuses! (Sorry, could you repeat that? I didn't quite get that due to the heavy accent, apologies!)

*BOOOOOOOM*

Client exploded in my ear xD.

Totally worth it! I'm all for helping and tried my best but if you're going to disrespect me, fuck off.

So Last year December my cousin see's me making a basic 3D game in Unity and says he wants to do programming.

Me: No, you don't want that. Become a doctor like your parents want you two.
Him: I'll do it.
Me: Ok. If you want to suffer, i'll teach you some basic C#

Me: *Shows him basic C# code in visual studio*
Him: *Not paying attention* Cool. When can i make games?
Me: That's not how this works. Where do you intend to study?
Him: M.I.T!
Me: You better get your ass infront of that fucken computer, google and youtube the shit out of you, matter of fact i'll get you a shit bucket so you don't have to get up.
Him: I don't have to go so hard now, i'm only 16.
Me: *Facepalm* That's why you have to do this now.

...7 months later...
(Yesterday)
Me: Show me how you make a basic calculator application.
Him: I don't know how to do that, you didn't show me.
Me: *laughing*
Him: Whats so funny?
Me: You're screwed *still laughing*

Don't get me wrong. He's a smart kid. Just needs to fucken do something if he wants his goal.

This is just my token of appreciation for the Skype devs. Can't begin to say how much I hate it. Your android app is a joke even after a host of updates, your desktop client is an even bigger joke (atleast Linux Beta version, I know betas aren't supposed to be stable but this is ridiculous).

You have reinvented chat clients to be extremely bulky, cumbersome and very hard to sync across devices. And you have managed to make it "buffer" more than a YouTube video does on a 2G network. I for one, am blown over by how you did that. And to top it all, you can't close the client on Linux atleast! All you did is just override the close button so that it only minimises it. Brilliant piece of work right there!

Why the hell can't you just close the client and run it in the background the proper way like everyone else does? Why does it have to take 20 *** seconds to open a message? The only reason I am stuck with this is some wierdos in the office still only use this. Get your shit together 😡

Ahh.. I feel much better now.

Sister comes into my room

"Can you look at moms laptop, it stopped working I'm scared I broke it"

Ask why

"Idk it just stopped working, all I did was install adobe flash player I dont think that could do it could it?"

Top kek

Take a look

"EFI IPV4 0 (error code) failed to boot"

Weird. Enter bios

"Hard drive: [Not detected]"

Well, that's no bueno

Pop open back, hard drive is loose

Pfft, push that fucker back in

Boot -> works

"Mom is going to kill me I broke it im so worried" -> relieved laughter

Adobeflashplayerkilledmyharddrive.jpg

Shook.exe

So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.

Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.

He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.

What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!

Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'

He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.

Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.

So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.

So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!

Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.

Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.

You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.

Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.

*Overhearding Convos*

A : "Dude, have you tried vim? It sucks!"

B: "I know right, why do they have to make it so hard to use..."

Me whispering : Git Gud Boi...

One day I developed a simple website for a goldsmith who I already new for a year or so.

We discussed everything and agreed on a feature set, price and a deadline when it should be ready. Based on this we signed a contract and I started my work.

Unfortunately at the same time I lost most of my childhood friends. I moved to a new city and started to study computer science, which was awesome on the contrary.

This is where the horror began.

I was totally occupied by the studying, my partner, myself and by the shit of life.

It knocked on my door. The horror decided to pay me a visit.

"Had a look at your calendar recently? Just saying..."

Shit! The deadline came closer and closer everyday and the pile of work undone grew with it. At that point I had to do something. I don't know what it was or how I did it, but somehow I managed to finish the project just in time. I was totally not proud of it, but it featured what was required.

The day before I contacted my client, the horror knocked on my door again. He said:

"You really should have a look at your hard drive."
"Why? everything seems allright."
"Well, then look closer."
"Fuck."
"Right."

Well, there are backups at least, I thought to myself. I'll just recover the last state. That was an annoying thought, but nothing serious. That's just one or two days of w... - Wait, what? Where are my backups? What the actual fuck? Why is the zip file broken? Why doesn't the flash drive work anymore? FUUUCK!!

I was lost. It was a complete nightmare.

Each time my telephone rang the following days, my heart skipped a beat. Finally my client's name appeared on the display. I answered the call, my hands shaking.

"Hey there! I'm calling to discuss the website project with you."
"Well, about that..."
"Yeah, I know you put a huge amount of efford in it so I'm really sorry to say that I on the other hand can't effort the money. Actually I'd like to simply forget about this whole idea."

Seriously? What the fuck just happend? I suddenly noticed a sticky note infront of me reading:
"It was really fun to see you suffer, but I have to go! See ya
- The Horror"

"Hello, are you still there? Do you hear me?", yelled a voice through my phone.
"Uh, yeah. You know, that project was a lot of work and... but you know what? It was actually a pretty fun exercise and I'm doing well over here, so because it's you I'd agree."
I heared a reliefed sigh from the other end of the line.
"Really good! I owe you something! Bye!"

What. The. Fuck.

1. There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

2. How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
None. It's a hardware problem.

3. A SEO couple had twins. For the first time they were happy with duplicate content.

4. Why is it that programmers always confuse Halloween with Christmas?
Because 31 OCT = 25 DEC

5. Why do they call it hyper text?
Too much JAVA.

6. Why was the JavaScript developer sad?
Because he didn't Node how to Express himself

7. In order to understand recursion you must first understand recursion.

8. Why do Java developers wear glasses? Because they can't C#

9. What do you call 8 hobbits?
A hobbyte

10. Why did the developer go broke?
Because he used up all his cache

11. Why did the geek add body { padding-top: 1000px; } to his Facebook profile?
He wanted to keep a low profile.

12. An SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, pub, tavern, public house, Irish pub, drinks, beer, alcohol

13. I would tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it.

14. 8 bytes walk into a bar, the bartenders asks "What will it be?"
One of them says, "Make us a double."

15. Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, "Are you ill?"
The second byte replies, "No, just feeling a bit off."

16. These two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, "So what'll it be?"
The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"
"Please excuse my friend," the second string says, "He isn't null-terminated."

17. "Knock, knock. Who's there?"
very long pause...
"Java."

18. If you put a million monkeys on a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.

19. There's a band called 1023MB. They haven't had any gigs yet.

20. There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

I hope you will forgive me for a third hand story, but I'm one of those evil developers, not a support per se. But I thought you'd enjoy this story anyway. So this happened to a colleague of a colleague:

$Hero - our hero. $Cop - A representative of our hard worked law enforcement agency.

So $Hero is happily speeding along in his car, running a few yellow lights a bit late, etc. Finally, the law catches up to him and pulls him over. Here's how the conversation went:

$Cop: Can I see your driving license, please?

$Hero (with smug grin): Certainly. Here it is, officer.

$Cop takes license back to motorcycle and speaks into radio.

$Hero: It's not going to help you any, though.

$Cop (with no reaction): What do you mean?

$Hero (with wider grin): The server you have to check it against is down.

$Cop (still no reaction): And why do you say that?

$Hero: Because I'm the guy they called to get on site and get it up again.

Our hero did not get a fine this time. Instead he got a police escort to his workplace.

Source: reddit r/talesfromtechsupport

Got basically nothing done yesterday because I was absolutely exhausted the entire day. Thanks, doxxing thread. But I couldn’t sleep anyway so whatever.

Told everyone at home that I wanted a really productive day tomorrow (today) because of it.

Guess what happened?
Endless fucking distractions.
Because of course.

• Cooking since apparently it’s my job.
• Extended computer repair and maintenance, since that’s apparently my job even when it’s not my computer.
• Conversations.
• Children following me.
• People paraphrasing politics.
• People summarizing stupid fail videos.
• People relating stupid prank videos.
• More conversations.
• Endless random nonsense comments from children.
• Endless noises from children’s toys, tablets, playing, etc.
• Children following me when I leave.
• Taking half an hour to order food instead of five minutes.
• Cleaning since nobody else ever does.
• Picking up toys since nobody else will and I’M FUCKING TIRED OF STEPPING ON AND TRIPPING OVER THEM.
• More fucking food prep.
• Endless random nonsense comments from children.
• More conversations.

Is it any wonder I’m so fucking pissed off every workday?

I can’t wait to move so I can have a fucking office with a fucking door and a fucking lock. And you know what? I’m going to splurge and install some fucking soundproofing, too.

WHY IS IT SO FUCKING HARD TO JUST LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!? I’M PAYING FOR YOUR FUCKING EVERYTHING. FUCK THE FUCK OFF!

Recruiter: I see you got a good degree, however, what were your high school results (A-levels)?

Me: why would you need them?
(they were average, but I tell the recruiter)

Recruiter: Oh, so you were pretty lucky to get a good degree.

Me: No... I worked really hard for it.

Recruiter: Anyway, my client only deals with people who got high grades in high school.

What the fuckkkkkkk?

#stopthismadness

Uncle- What do you do?

Me- I'm a software engineer

Uncle- My brother's friend's son is also a software engineer.

Me- (so what am I supposed to do about it?) yes that's nice

Uncle- I have a great idea, u should implement, I'm just telling you, it is a revolutionary idea

Me- (oh fuck, not again) yes tell

Uncle- you should make a matrimonial site which tracks what people do on internet and tell their to-be-spouses about it

Me - (yeah, I'll get sued for breach of privacy, and it has got nothing to do with my current line of work, and will probably cause divorces before marriage) yes great idea uncle

Uncle- see I told you this billion dollar idea, u should do hard work and make it

Just WHY in god's name do all uncles think laptop is a magic box in which I just have to type their idea in and it will spit out a website/software in 2 minutes. I don't go around advising them about their line of work.

!!rant
!!ANGER

Micromanager: "Hey, Root!

Since you're back, and still not feeling well, we have an easy ticket for you: Rewrite the slack integration gem! Oh, you don't have to re-implement all of it, just make sure it all works the same way it does now. That bitch you worked with once over a year ago who kept throwing you under the bus to management and stealing credit for your work? Yeah, she wrote the original code like four years ago. It's perfect, so don't touch it. but she can fill you in on all the details you need and get you up to speed on how to test it.

But yep! It should be simple. and I just knew you would love this ticket, so I saved it just for you. Nice and quick, too, to get you an easy win.

You know, since you have to repair your reputation with product. and management. and the execs. and the rest of the team. and me. Yeah, product doesn't trust you so they don't want to give you any tickets. They just can't trust you to get them out and have them work. So you have a lot of hard work to do."

Spoiler: The bus-thrower wasn't much help. (Surprise.)
Spoiler: The ticket was already in my backlog -- one of a grand total of two tickets.
Spoiler: I don't find the ticket fun. Maybe if I was to write the entire implementation with a nice DSL? but no, "don't touch the perfect code." Fuck you.
Spoiler: It isn't going to be nice or quick. But, she (micromanager) is looking to lose me, so that really is an easy win. for her.

And. just. argh. fuck you. i've been exhausted and dying for well over a year, but you've kept ignoring that (and still are, despite me providing goddamn legal forms from fucking doctors stating it in plain fucking english, which you also fucking ignore), and you just keep piling on the work and demanding the ridiculous of me despite it. Yeah I can pull it off sometimes. No, I really shouldn't, and I'm surprised I can. (also, "Time off? What, and lower your productivity even more? ____ doesn't even take vacations. And how are you doing on that ticket?") And no, none of my tickets have ever had any fucking problems. Not even when there are upstream service outages. Not. a. single. fucking. one. Ever. And the only things I've ever missed were things that bloody product never put in the fucking ticket, so fuck you with your "repair your reputation" bullshit.

god, i fuckiNG HATE THESESTUPOID ANWETLJAF SAJEWTKW BITCHFACEDUCKFUCKERS

Why the FUCK am I still fucking working here?
Right, because I've been burned out and dying so much I can't pass a fucking interview so I can fucking leave.

jasdkl;fk

ugh. Anyway. If you ever find yourself starting work at a Cali fintech company whose internal mascot is a very fine duck? Just run. I absolutely guarantee you will be miserable.

Imagine, you get employed to restart a software project. They tell you, but first we should get this old software running. It's 'almost finished'.
A WPF application running on a soc ... with a 10" touchscreen on win10, a embedded solution, to control a machine, which has been already sold to customers. You think, 'ok, WTF, why is this happening'?
You open the old software - it crashes immediately.
You open it again but now you are so clever to copy an xml file manually to the root folder and see all of it's beauty for the first time (after waiting for the freezed GUI to become responsive):
* a static logo of the company, taking about 1/5 of the screen horizontally
* circle buttons
* and a navigation interface made in the early 90's from a child
So you click a button and - it crashes.
You restart the software.
You type something like 'abc' in a 'numberfield' - it crashes.
OK ... now you start the application again and try to navigate to another view - and? of course it crashes again.
You are excited to finally open the source code of this masterpiece.

Thank you jesus, the 'dev' who did this, didn't forget to write every business logic in the code behind of the views.
He even managed to put 6 views into one and put all their logig in the code behind!
He doesn't know what binding is or a pattern like MVVM.
But hey, there is also no validation of anything, not even checks for null.
He was so clever to use the GUI as his place to save data and there is a lot of parsing going on here, every time a value changes.
A thread must be something he never heard about - so thats why the GUI always freezes.

You tell them: It would be faster to rewrite the whole thing, because you wouldn't call it even an alpha. Nobody listenes.
Time passes by, new features must be implemented in this abomination, you try to make the cripple walk and everyone keeps asking: 'When we can start the new software?' and the guy who wrote this piece of shit in the first place, tries to give you good advice in coding and is telling you again: 'It was almost finished.' *facepalm*
And you? You would like to do him and humanity a big favour by hiting him hard in the face and breaking his hands, so he can never lay a hand on any keyboard again, to produce something no one serious would ever call code.

Dev: Hey that internal audit you asked me to perform didn’t go so well

Manager: It has too! I’ll get in a lot of trouble if it doesn’t pass.

Dev: Ok well it’s a lot of work to get it to a passing state, we have to dedicate a lot of resources to fix all these findings.

Manager: We don’t have any spare resources, they are all working on new projects! Why did you have to find things??

Dev: ….It’s a lot of hard to miss stuff, like missing signatures on security clearance forms

Manager: Ok can’t you just say that everything is all good? They’ll probably not double check.

Dev: I’m not really comfortable with that…Look all of these findings are all just from one member of the team consistently not doing their job, can’t you just address that with him and I can make a note on the audit that issues were found but corrective action was made? That’s the whole point of audits.

Manager: You don’t get it, if anything is found on the audit I’ll look bad. We have to cover this up. Plus that’s a really good friend of mine! I can’t do that to him. Ok you know what? You are obviously not the right person for this task, I’ll get someone else to do it. Go back to your regular work, I’m never assigning you audits again.

So before today, I'd never used GoDaddy before. Not even once. My supervisor walks in and happily informs me that I'm going to be adding photos to a website that she does editing for. Okay, fine, that's stupidly easy. What I did not realize, however, is that this entire website had been built using GoDaddy's site builder, and if you're not familiar with it, thank whatever gods you worship that you've dodged that bullet. I hardly want to go wandering around somebody else's web hosting, so I search about for a bit praying that there's SOME semblance of a normal text editor someplace, because text editors make me happy and all, and find very little on the regular site. Already not thrilled. So I figure, how bad is this site editor? Really, how bad can it possibly be?
Oh, you poor misguided son of a -
Anyway, I go in and look at the site. Slideshows everywhere, nothing is aligned correctly, it's a web designer's nightmare. Thankfully, I'm not a web designer, so I press on and reorganize a little bit. I try slapping a new slideshow on their, and discover that unlike the way it SHOULD work, elements do not move to allow for other elements, they just sit there and let you throw things on top of them. I stare at my neatly-stacked slideshows for a second in utter disbelief, knowing but not really accepting that I'm going to need to take every last one of those slideshow elements and slide those little so-and-so's down by hand. ....why? Who designed this? Who decided that was a good idea? I do some Googling to see if there's anything out there to make this less horrid, and lo and behold I find a GoDaddy page about their FTP file manager! It's under web/classic hosting, which apparently means it's deprecated because I spent the next ten minutes hunting around for the "web hosting" link those chicken-lickers were so proud of and it's nowhere to be found.
Alright, so they want to do this the hard way.
At this point I'm screaming internally and PRAYING that I'm just being stupid and not seeing anything to make it easi-
No, not even easier. Just less stupid. This website builder makes no sense. It's like hiring a contractor to build a bridge and handing him a box of Legos and a banana.
So I do more googling and find instructions on getting to the file manager. FINALLY. The first step is find "Hosting" under "My Products." I rush over to My Products joyfully, hoping I can get this stupid website up and running reasonably quickly, and...!
There's no hosting tab.
No button.
Not even a little hard-to-see link. At this point my brain is screaming. WHY would you give me a website builder but absolutely no way to actually write the website? Do people actually use this thing? I mean, I get it if they want to make it nice and accessible for people to make websites without overwhelming them with HTML but if they know how to edit the website and they don't want your help, why would you force me in to this? Why? Then it occurred to me that maybe the organization just hasn't ever had a web developer in it, ever, or at least not one who was willing to help out with the website, so they purposefully signed up for hosting that deprived them of any kind of HTML editor. Then on top of all of that, I noticed that on the home page, which had been edited by someone else long before I ever looked at it, ALSO had one of these stupid slideshows that I had to reorganize by hand, and some sad, angry little man had put in one of the photos sideways. It was SIDEWAYS. Just sitting there on its side, the photo's occupants staring at me with sad eyes begging me to turn them facing up again. I sat there and stared at a badly-designed website in a questionably-designed editor. And I wondered. I wondered who put this all together, and I wondered why *I* was the one doing it, when I work for a university and the website was for some beach homeowner's association. And I wondered if this job was a task that my supervisor had agreed to do and just passed off onto an office monkey. And I wept bitter tears at the realization that I am that office monkey.

Why in the name of Donald Knuth did you think it was a good idea to have a 1500 line Java Method? What THE HELL WERE YOU SMOKING THE ENTIRE FILE IS OVER 3000 LINES AND HALF OF THEM ARE COMMENTED OUT!

Don't even get me started on your "unit tests" which is a massive 5000 line behemoth that randomly has massive swaths of code commented out.

And of course no solution like this would be complete with you HARD CODING EVERY F****INIG STRING IN EVERY TIME!

And it's not like you don't know how to use classes as you have several of them, every single one of which is over 500+ lines and consists of only getters and setters. LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO A MAP! REALLY WHY WOULD YOU USE 500 LINES FOR A CLASS THAT IS JUST GETTERS AND SETTERS?!

The part that really burns me about all of this though, isn't the fact that you sent it to me when I was running into a similar issue, and said "check this out it should help", what bothers me most isn't the indescribable rage I felt looking at your code, the part that really really really bothers me is that you are a veteran with over 15 years in Java development, and according to the org chart are a lead senior engineer getting paid substantially more than me, whereas I am considered a lowly mid-level developer, who isn't worth promoting to your level.

On the plus side you are now going to be featured on theDailyWTF so congrats on the notoriety.

All web developers should support up to IE9 without any problems.

Why? Because in Korea, it is normal.

Every person uses that damn Win7, which has either IE9 or IE10. Without IE support, no one will browse your webpage.

Now you would ask us, why don't you use other modern browsers?

We would then ask you, why would you install a new browser that is
1. Buggy
2. Heavy
3. Takes up ram
4. Has so many features
when you have an awesome minimalistic browser that is preinstalled, and works in all Windows? No thanks.

So, if you put a message saying you will soon drop support of IE, it means that you won't target Korea. Just after the support drop, there won't be traffic to your web site.

So what is the point of this rant?
1. We love IE. Lol
2. IE is lightweight, minimalistic, and the fastest browser in the world.
3. All websites should NOT drop support for IE.
4. We don't care whether web devs will have a hard time. We just think websites are built with Wix and Wordpress, and they work in IE, meaning, IE support is the number one priority.
5. If you ever start a business in Korea, and has a website, make sure to hire an senior Korean web dev who has worked with IE for a long time.
6. Here is the tl;dr
Hate us. Period.

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.

Lord forgive me for laughing too hard at this person/situation... I kid you NOT!

So today while everything was going well, we suddenly had network issues at work. We worked to get everything back up online asap and then sent out an email for those affected to either restart their machines or refresh their desktops but we recommend restarting... After some few client calls, this special call came in..

Riiing, riiiiiing, ring....
Me: hi, how can help you?

Client: *laughing.. This is probably a stupid question but I forgot how to "refresh" my desk top..the thing is, I have Febreeze but I don't think that's for desk tops.

Me: Wait, what? 🤔 Febreeze for what?😕

Client: You guys sent an email to refresh our desk tops and I said I have Febreeze so how will that get my things in the computer back to show again?

Me: Ohhh, no no. We meant your computer desktop. You don't need Febreeze. Right click anywhere on your computer in the screen and select refresh from the pop up menu. We meant your computer "desktop" not your actual "desk top".

Client: *starts laughing...I told you it was a stupid question

Me: don't worry.. It wasn't stupid.

After I hang up, some of my team members asked me why someone is asking about Febreeze...I told them and they all started laughing hysterically

I was still trying to digest the conversation I had just have on the phone. 😂😂😂

Windows, God damn you piece of fucking shit.

Why the fuck can't you make networking fucking easy like literally every other fucking operating system in the goddamn fucking world?

Why the fuck can't I spoof mac addresses so that I have the same IP address regardless of if I'm on a hard line or wireless?

Who in their fucking right mind thought that the pro version of Windows wouldn't need to do that?

I don't even like using you at this point, I'm forced to use you for work.

There's literally not enough explicitives that I can chain together to sufficiently convey how much I fucking hate you Microsoft. So enjoy this seizure inducing tourette's mode compilation.

Fuck shit cock piss mother fucker asshole bitch mother fucker sick and tired of your fucking shit Microsoft you fucking cuck piece of shit nobody fucking likes you they only have to use you because no fucking business in their right mind is going to spend the millions of dollars it cost to fucking switch over to fucking Mac or Linux I hope you fucking choking a bag of HIV riddled flaming dicks you fucking piece of shit.

Some motherfucker at the gym called me. “Hey @growling, I am here with that gym you signed up with 5 months ago and your card for membership renewal isn’t working.”

“It’s 8:00am”

“Yes sir. It’s 8am.”

“Don’t you think it’s a bit too early?”

“Did you get a new card?”

“Hey call me at lunch or something, I’m going back to sleep.”

“Okay, or you can call me. Goodbye”
Acting like you got better shit to do with your time.

Like he wanted to lecture me and say waking me up at 8am is fine. Like he wanted to say he came from a hardworking family and so he can say waking me up at 8am is fine. Shiiit dude my mom used to work with two broken hips for 7 days a week until I made six figures. Bless her heart, that’s why I got her a new car and money each month to pay all her bills. She’s been out of work for 2-3 years now. So lecture me. Only my mom can lecture me, boy. Cause she raised me to be an engineer.

Also, why do I see this everywhere as well? I get lectured for drinking beer on a Sunday or Monday during lunch at my frequent visits to liquor store.

“Don’t you have work?”
Yes, 9-5. But I’m an engineer. So it can be 10-6 or 11-7. Doesn’t matter. All of the stuff I do follows sprints and not direct interaction with customers!

I get tasks done and I teach interns to help me get tasks done. In time. And sometimes even more.

I know my schedule is so lax you want to criticize me. Maybe you think I don’t work? Or work as hard as you?

Tl;dr I intentionally act like a spoiled baby when it comes to work so that service/retail/manual labor people lecture me so I can tell them that we work differently than what they’re used to.

I have free snacks. Don’t get me started about gloating about free beef jerky. People hate me on online forums for doing that! Drink beer on tap in work kitchen. A glass of wine anytime I want. Sleep in until sometimes 11am. But that’s why I’m an engineer, buddy.

Worst code review experience?

Hard to pick just one, but most were in a big meeting room with 4+ other developers not related to the project and with some playing Monday-Morning-Quarterback instead of offering productive feedback.

In one code review, the department mgr reviewed the code from a third party component library.

<brings up the code on the big screen>
Mgr: "I can't read any of this, its a mix of English and something else."
Me: "Its German."
Mgr: "Then why is 'Button' in English? This code is a mess."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how I should respond, I mean, I didn't write any of this code."
Mgr: "Yes, but you are using it, so it's fair game for a code review."
Me: "Its not really open source, but we can make requests if you found something that needs to be addressed."
Mgr: "Oh yes, all this...whatever this is..<pointing again to the German>"
Me: "I don't think they will change their code to English just so you can read it."
Mgr: "We paid good money, you bet your ass they'll change it!"
Me: "I think the components were like $30 for the unlimited license. They'll tell us to go to hell first. Is there something about my code you want to talk about?"
Mgr: "<Ugggh>...I guess not, I couldn't get past all that German. Why didn't we go with an American company? Hell, why didn't we just write these components ourselves!?"
Me: "Because you gave a directive that if we found components that saved us time, to put in a request, and you approved the request. The company is American, they probably outsourced or hired German developers. I don't know and not sure why we care."
Mgr: "Security! What if they are sending keystrokes back to their servers!"
Me: "Did you see any http or any network access?"
Mgr: "How could I? The code is in German!"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback1: "If it were me, I would have written the components myself and moved on"
Me: "No, I don't think you could for less than $30"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback2: "Meh...we get paid anyway. Just add the time to the estimate."
Mgr: "Exactly! Why do we even have developers who can't read this mess."
Me: "Oh good Lord! Did anyone review or even look at my code for this review!?"
<silence>
Mgr: "Oh...ok...I guess we're done here. Thanks everyone."
<everyone starts to leave>
Me: "Whoa!...wait a sec..am I supposed to do something?"
Mgr: "Get that company to write their code in English so we can read it. You have their number, call em'...no...wait...give me their number. You keep working, I'll take care of this personally"

In they nicest way possible, the company did tell him to go to hell.

The guy where I can only shake my head when I see his code, and he is really proud of if implementations, while he

- doesn't care about warnings

- breaks builds and doesn't care

- doesn't care about code styles and indents in a very column based way

- adds tons of comments to his code, mostly hard to understand, and sometimes that much you can hardly find the code

- implements a tokenizer where you have to inherit from its interface (Why would I wanna implement whole functions for a tokenizer and not just use it in place where needed? How do I use two of those in one class?)

- implement a "generic" state machine base class with fixed lengths array of 3 events and 3 strings (Why would I need events and strings hardcoded in a "generic" state machine? Why a maximum of 3?)

- once delivered a software without the needed runtime components, so the whole system (embedded device) wasn't working properly and only by chance missed the point of disabling update mechanisms

- make your ears bleed about his big inventions whenever he sees you, no matter how often he already told you about that blazing new feature

writing library code is hard.

there are sooo many details that go into writing good libraries:

designing intuitive and powerful apis
deciding good api option defaults, disallowing or warning for illegal operations

knowing when to throw, knowing when to warn/log
handling edge cases
having good code coverage with tests that doesn't suck shit, while ensuring thry don't take a hundred years to run

making the code easy to read, to maintain, robust
and also not vulnerable, which is probably the most overlooked quality.

"too many classes, too little classes"

the functions do too much it's hard to follow them
or the functions are so well abstracted, that every function has 1 line of code, resulting in code that is even harder to understand or debug (have fun drowning in those immense stack traces)

don't forget to be disciplined about the documentation.

most of these things are
deeply affected by the ecosystem, the tools of the language you're writing this in:

like 5 years ago I hated coding in nodejs, because I didn't know about linters, and now we have tools like eslint or babel, so it's more passable now

but now dealing with webpack/babel configs and plugins can literally obliterate your asshole.

some languages don't even have a stable line by line debugger (hard pass for me)

then there's also the several phases of the project:

you first conceive the idea, the api, and try to implement it, write some md's of usage examples.

as you do that, you iterate on the api, you notice that it could better, so you redesign it. once, twice, thrice.

so at that point you're spending days, weeks on this side project, and your boss is like "what the fuck are you doing right now?"

then, you reach fuckinnnnng 0.1.0, with a "frozen" api, put it on github with a shitton of badges like the badge whore you are.

then you drop it on forums, and slack communities and irc, and what do you get?

half of the community wants to ban you for doing self promotion

the other half thinks either
a) your library api is shitty
b) has no real need for it
c) "why reinvent the wheel bruh"

that's one scenario,

the other scenario is the project starts to get traction.

people start to star it and shit.
but now you have one peoblem you didn't have before: humans.

all sorts of shit:

people treating you like shit as if they were premium users.

people posting majestically written issues with titles like "people help, me no work, here" with bodies like "HAAAAAAAAAALP".

and if you have the blessing to work in the current js ecosystem, issues like "this doesn't work with esm, unpkg, cdnjs, babel, webpack, parcel, buble, A BROWSER".
with some occasional lunatic complaining about IE 4 having a very weird, obscure bug.

not the best prospect either.

Interviewer: So which university are you from?

Me: I am from "foo" university.

Interviewer: So why did you not go to "bar" university?

Inner Me: Wtf kind of a question is that. Why the fuck aren't you a unicorn with pigs flying out of your ass and a globally reknowned researcher at Stanford?
We all end up where destiny takes us. Some of us try very hard but things don't magically happen for us. We keep trying but at the end of the day you end up where you end up.

Real Me: I just finished my High School and had the entry test the next day. I was not prepared at all.

It's only day one of the year and I'm already pissed right off

Why the fuck do all clients expect you to come up with absolutely everything!?

All I ever get is we want a website. I ask well what do you want on it.. our products .. news? Contact maybe ... Urm our business information ... That kind of stuff.

Well what are they?

Pft.. I here is a name if our products. And other stuff

WE ARE SELLING IT WAT ARE THE PRICES AND INFORMATION DO YOU HAVE IMAGES

Yeah do you want them

Of course I do 😐

Great here's 2 of them we have 1100 so I'll get more to you soon.

😤 Thank you!

Holy shit it's always like talking to a fucking brick wall.. why do people have to make our jobs so hard it's already fucking tough

I have no time to plan your entire website by myself I don't know what you want on it. How could I possibly know that!? It's your fucking site

Client: why do I have to use such a hard password for this website?

Me: For security reasons to protect your content and identity of your clients.

Client: Can't you just use the password that I'm used to? I use it on my banking software, and I've never been hacked so it should be good enough for you!

Me: what's the password that you want me to set up for you?

Client: you ready to take it down?

Me: go ahead.

Client: T ... U ... R ... D. You got that?

Me: ... Yes ...

*sigh*

(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.

Why its so hard to understand that - not always... - frontend devs will give you a sweet ui with medium back end and back end devs are gonna give you a medium ui with sweet back end?

Why can't we just do what nature made us good for and work in collaboration?

Fuck

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.

I couldn't sleep. I was staring at the blinking cursor. A slow, comforting blinking. Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the JavaScript ecosystem. If I saw something like a new build system, or a new framework, I had to have it.

My client changed the requirements again. I'm in pain.

- "You want to see pain?" my colleague said. Go read Apple support forums. That's pain.

I became addicted. Every time I died and every time I was born again. Resurrected.
During the night, I was crying in the Apple forums for an official answer that would never come. During the day, I was surfing StackOverflow to fix my problems. You get "single-serving" friends there. They help you, you help them, and then you never see them again.

- "Then you install Stack and boom, you're done. It's that easy to go functional."

That's how I met him.

- "You know why they make so many javascript frameworks?"
- "No, why?"
- "So that they can distract you while they put backdoors in them. So that you don't have time to check all of their code".
- "You are by far the most interesting "single-serving" friend I've ever met"

Then, my hard disk died. Of course, I didn't have backups: nobody has enough space for all those node_modules folders. All my addictions, lost.

Then I wrote him. If you asked me now, I couldn't tell you why I wrote him. We chatted a lot.

- "It's late, I should really go search another hdd on ebay"
- "Ebay? You called me so you could have my old hard disk."
- "No, I..."
- "Come on."

He sent me his old hard disk. It was a 256MB hard disk, but it was fine for running Arch. Then he asked me to rant about my problems in front of him.

- "I want you to rant as hard as you can"
- "Are you serious?"

We ranted all night about our bosses and clients and their fucked up requests. We kept in touch, and after a while more people were ranting with us. Every week, he gave the rules that he and I decided.

- "The first rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant. The second rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant."

I like to think this is how devRant started. This might also be the reason why we never see @trogus, only @dfox. A lot of shit still needs to happen.

It's 2017.

Why is vertically centering a div still so stinkin hard?

Yeah yeah ik what you will tell me, "use flexbox".
Well guess what,. I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO FOR THE PAST 6 FUCKING HOURS!

I've gone as far as to copy code from 20+ different websites advertising working solutions. My tab bar looks like the fucking rockey mountains!

My main problem is that flexbox on chrome is not accepting ANY % values.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go kill myself. YAY! 🤗

*spends a long time crafting a huge eBay post (we're moving)
* tries to drag and drop first picture
* page navigates to the picture without warning
* loses everything

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

WHEN DRAGGING A PICTURE INTO A WEB PAGE I NEVER WANT TO NAVIGATE TO A PAGE WITH JUST THAT IMAGE. WHY NO WARNING BEFORE LEAVING THE PAGE. WHY DON'T YOU SAVE TEXT LOCALLY. WHY DOES THE WEB SUCK SO HARD. AAAGGGHHHH.

* feels better
* starts over

Apple iPhone testing without being on the app store is so annoying, I had to sign up some people to test the app I've been working on and had issues on my end, it really is this whole security bullshit, really it isn't needed.

I couldn't get the team provisional certificate thing to show up because when I clicked the account the team certificate settings would disappear, only after right clicking and hitting help then clicking the team while it was selected could I go to the right window.

I don't see why it's so damn hard to do this crap.

Yet with Android, it's so easy.

I really have issues with the testing for this iPhone app, I went through so many different ways to try and get it to work.

Anyways all done, crashlytics is an awesome testing tool if you can get around that small issue I had.

Screw the current Stack Overflow community so hard. It's still basically the only place to get answers but I'm sick and tired of the "you missed a period on line 7 why are you even on this site??" attitude. Look here, yeah it's my bad for missing that part, but I'm pretty sure that if you can't figure out that I missed an obvious ".ToArray()" when pulling my code together for a sample, then you aren't gonna be able to answer my bit-shifting question in the first place.

I recently ranted so much about languages but here it goes

JS we need to talk. BECAUSE YOU GOT FAT AND UGLY STUPID BITCH! Dumb piece of bloatware. What even is your problem? Depending on a library for strpad and then blow up like Steve jobs ego. Bastardized fuckfest. I used to like you bro and then you screw me over!
It's like you fuck my wife while I try to fix your car. Why can't you even be usefully on your own anymore? I'd be richer than bill gates if I get a dollar for every damn framework people pull from their asses. Are you writing this fuck while shitting so you can compare colors of your outcome?

Normalize the fucking base, don't add to the bukkakke! bitch is drowning already. Why is everyone jerking of to react and angular? When have YOU written something in vanilla the last time? Why even bother? Remove the core and hardcore every damn framework into the browsers. Guess that saves you 200kb. Oh wait I forgot that's about unminified jQuery.

Now I need to load about 2GB of dependencies, some creating code that puts code in my code to load code out of my code which was generated out of something that remotely resembles JS so every browser is able to execute my fancy shit. But hey, it's fast. And of course there are the fanboys. You are worse than apple fags. You sample your own jizz with your friends in a wine glass. there was a Time it was bad practice to mix logic and view. Now you made it mandatory. "Browser does the rendering" ofc you imbecile pile of fuck don't show me a damn preloader for 1 picture and 20 lines of text. Who fucked your brain so hard?

So react seems to be the cool kid now, then I tell someone I know angular it's like showing up in a pikachu onsie to a formal dinner with the queen.

I used to love you girl. I loved how we could dirty things together. Now you are like a pig. Please loose weight bby the sight of you disgusts me nowadays

This one crazy:
We made an app for our client to scan some parcels via barcode.

They just created a ticket, for complaining that it's hard to scan in the storage room, because it's so dark. They are like sometimes we need to use a torge to scan. Can you increase the contrast of the app or something to scan better in darker place.

Did not know what to answer, but my thoughts were like: why the fuck you don't put enough light in that room?! 🤔🤷🏽‍♂️

every day I get phone calls from some idiot to moan about something I fixed.

I had a job to copy a site and use it for another company, with everyone's consent. I do it and found the original was garbage. hard coded functionalities. limited control over which pages appear in the menu and so on.

problem is the site administrator doesn't understand the system and made pages visible on the menu that shouldn't be and so on. these never showed up before because it was broken.

now she phones every day because she setup her pages wrong originally and tells me stuff like, why did you change this, it worked before and crap.

I never expected she would have setup the pages incorrectly so I never thought this would happen.

lesson here is if it's broken and you're the only one that's noticed, just bloody leave it.

SICK AND TIRED OF READABILITY VS. EFFICIENCY!!!!!!!

I HAD TO SEPARATE A 4 LOC JSON STRING, WHICH HAD AN ARRAY OF A SINGLE KEY-VALUE PAIRS (TOTAL OF 10 OBJECTS IN THE ARRAY).

ITS READABLE IF YOU KNOW JSON. HOW HARD IS TO READ JSON FORMAT IF YOU GET YOUR STYLE AND INDENTATION PROPERLY?!?

SO I HAD TO
BREAK THE POOR FREAKING JSON APART TO A FUCKING DIFFERENT YAML FILE FORMAT ONLY SO I CAN CALL IT FROM THERE TO THE MAIN CONTROLLER, ITERATE AND MANIPULATE ALL THE ID AND VALUES FROM YAML BACK TO MATCH THE EXPECTED JSON RESPONSE IN THE FRONT END.

THE WHOLE PROCESS TOOK ME ABOUT 15 MINUTES BUT STILL, THE FUCKING PRINCIPLE DRIVES ME INSANE.

WHY THE FUCK SHOULD I WASTE TIME AT AN ALREADY WORKING PIECE OF CODE, TO MAKE IT LESS EFFICIENT AND A SLIGHTLY BIT MORE READABLE?!? FML.

The best decision I ever made was moving from a big company to a very small one.

I used to work for a large international consulting firm in the model development team. Everything moved so slowly, there were huge amounts of pointless meetings and other time-sinks, we were surrounded by people who were being paid a lot of money but added little or no value, and the general atmosphere of the company was quite depressing. We spent more time having to make PowerPoint presentations for senior management trying to explain why you can't just hire 100 devs and have a product 100 times faster than we actually did developing a product.

I took a bit of a risk and moved to become the fourth person (and second developer) at a niche software producer to take over product innovation and lead product development. Immediately I felt so much happier and realised how much the previous company had worn me down. Everyone works hard and efficiently because your individual output is so much more important to the success of the company and the work you put in comes back to you financially without being syphoned by layers of valueless management levels or time-wasters.

Having responsibility, seeing the impact of your own work and being rewarded accordingly is so important for your sense of well-being. I urge you all to try it if you're stuck in a big company that's wearing you down. And if you're considering moving from a small company to a big one: don't.

Send help..

The project we're currently working on:

- an angular codebase that's broken beyond recognition - nothing's working as it should

- user stories are estimated in hours, but estimations are treated as hard facts. Since the app is so broken, everything takes longer than usual and it's almost impossible to consider every potential hardship during refinements, therefore, we constantly need more time than we have estimated

- retrospectives (intentional plural here, since one time isn't enough) are used to discuss why we cannot manage to finish tickets within the estimations

- the design was made beforehand and is extremely inconsistent and inaccessible

- if you open a new ticket, you need to add a reason for why this ticket is needed - in addition to the ticket description..

- The moment you move a ticket to QA, the "Scrum Master" breathes down your neck, shoving new tickets in your face. Despite having to finish up the other two you're still working on

- multiple teams are working on the application, but - of course - communication is overrated.

I could go on, but I'm too tired..
We were supposed to help the client for a couple of months - we're close to a year now and still nowhere near done.

DHL? More like, "Du Hurensohn Lieferst ned!"
Seriously! Fuck DHL so fucking hard! Why the FUCK can you deliver 2 FUCKING PACKAGES, WHICH REQUIRE SIGNING, INFRONT OF MY FUCKING ENTRANCE!! But not, A FUCKING 3rd one! LIKE SERIOUSLY! I WAS AT FUCKING HOME THE ENTIRE FUCKING DAY! THEN I RECIEVE AN EMAIL THAT THE FUCKING PACKAGE "couldnt be delivered because I wasnt at home" YEAH FUCK YOU! 2 INFRONT OF MY FUCKING DOOR! and then... I see him... that fucking DHL guy, with my package, going INTO HIS FUCKING SHITASS DHL CAR, AND DRIVING OFF!
I literally just wanted to open the window and scream "HEY DHL, MEIN SCHEISS PACKET! WO ISSET!?" but I didnt...

FUCK THESE COCKSUCKERS FROM DHL! I HAVE A FUCKING LOUD DOORBELL! RING THAT THING! THERES A BUTTON WITH MY NAME NEXT TO IT!

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

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

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

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

DO !!!NOT!!!!! USE 'X' AND 'P' TO 'CUT AND PASTE' A LOT OF LINES ACROSS FILES IN VIM!!! HOLY SHIT I JUST PWNED MYSELF SO HARD I LOST SO MUCH CODE HOLY FUCK IT'S NOT EVEN FUNNY! WHERE DID AT ALL GO YOU ASK, WHY THE FUCKING REGISTER, OK LET'S CHECK THE REGISTER, COOL THERE IT IS, BUT WAIT, THERE'S ONLY LIKE 20% OF IT BECAUSE WE CUT A SHIT LOAD OF LINES AT ONCE, AND THE REGISTER OVERFILLED.... Ok let's calm down, doesn't Vim have a recovery option? Yes it does, but WAIT A FUCKING MINUTE, MY CHANGES ARE NOT IN THE SWAP FILE BECAUSE IT'S NOT LIKE VIM CRASHED OR ANYTHING, MY DUMB-FUCK-ASS WILLFULLY WROTE THE CHANGES WHEN I SWITCHED OVER TO THE NEW FILE, AND NOW, WELL THAT'S IT, YOU'RE DEAD KIDDO, YOU WROTE THE CHANGES TO DISK, NOTHING YOU CAN DO, AND I AM SO SCREWED I SPECIFICALLY MADE A DEVRANT ACCOUNT TO MAKE SURE NO ONE ELSE PWNS HIMSELF AS HARD AS I JUST DID HOLY FUCK

Complete and total rant:

You know what fucking confuses the holy fucking shit out of me? DESIGN

I have MAD respect for motherfuckers that spend their days tailoring shit away in CSS, writing custom animations and toggles in JS and ensuring that their HTML is pristine as fuck. I really do and in my opinion they should b getting mad props from everyone, because if they so decide to learn GOOD server side scripting then they are most definitely on their way to create some awesome functional and beautiful shit.

But...

I am not a designer by any means of it. And I know that shit is supposed to look good and work across a multitude of devices. Doing something like that takes me a couple of lines of code (granted, after hours of work that is) that may take a designer way less.

But why oh why do I see THOUSANDS of lines of CSS code for shit that does not take me half the amount of work that it takes other people?
Like seriously. I am trying to emulate the menu that university of Chicago uses(as an example for a lil design practice cuz i suck at it) and looking into their CSS I see thooooousands of lines of code to do something that I did in about two hundred.

So wtf man, do I suck so hard that I am missing some serious shit? wtf is happening? This confuses me, because in my mind it should take me just about as much work as it takes them right?

AGAIN MAD RESPECT FOR DESIGNERS -- If you are a designer reading this please tell me wtf is happening

A discussion about writing tests for frontend applications.

Context: my frontend coworkers don't write tests, at all. Yeah, really. Our testing process is very manual. We test manually when developing. We test manually when reviewing code. After merging, the application is deployed to a staging server and the design team does a QA Sprint. Lots of manual testing and some bugs still crawl by.

So I decided to start pushing my coworkers to start writing tests. One of the reasons I constantly hear them say to not write tests in the frontend is: "It's not worth the time, because design keeps changing, which means we have to take time to fix the tests. Time that we usually don't have."

I've been thinking about this a lot and it seems to me that this is more related to bad tests than to tests in general.

Tests should not break with design changes (small changes at least). They should test funcionality, not how things look. A form should not break if the submit button's style changes, so why should its tests fail? I also think that tests help save time, as they prevent some back and forth because of bugs.

Writing good tests is the hard part. Tests that cover what's really important and aren't frail and break with things that shouldn't break them. What (and how) should we test? And what shouldn't be tested?

Writing them fast is another hard thing. Are you doing it right if they take more time to write than the actual code?

What do you think about this? Do you write tests for your frontend applications? What do you test? How much time do you spend writing tests? What are your testing tools/frameworks?

Hi yall! I've been here a while, but never actually posted anything. Love reading your rants though, always makes me giggle^^
Anyways, I'm a IT student and I got this new job as an IT-consultant.
So we had this big meeting today, together with the CEO and a lot of other new employees with different engineering profession... So everything went fine until the end. We were supposed to stand up and say our names, what we're studying and tell a fun fact about ourselves and I TOTALLY fucked it up... I kinda said my name, I completely forgot to tell what I'm studying and my fun fact was something about ppl having a hard time with my name. Like, wtf are you even saying dude?! All I wanted was to was write code, why can't I just do that?

What I don't understand is why it is so hard for some seniors to just let me jot my notes down, I get it you're busy but if you just let me write down certain key words, I will never ask you this question again, I am nervous cause I had to bug you for help so my mind is not taking anything in, its freaking out cause you're making it so clear I am a bother! So I'm gonna go back to my desk without notes and no idea of what you just tried to tell me.... It was never a problem for my first senior, and he even became my mentor! In a question of 6 months he could go on holiday cause I could handle all his responsibilities until he came back with my trusty note book in hand... So why are you telling me to stop making notes!! It works for me so leave me be!! - sits at desk, pondering why I exist - 😖

I am so fucking done with all these incompetent fucktards!!! Why would you keep a client-brief in secret from your colleagues?! Why on your screwed delusional Earth you think it is perfectly okay if you don’t communicate the changes ahead your team? How could you - microbrained prehistoric dinosaur who petrified to your own semen - think that I can estimate with my time and do my work when you are barely able to think ahead 2 minutes without letting me know the actual scope and deadlines???!!! AND NO telling me the day before NOT GONNA MAKE IT VALID!!!! You failed in life you failed in evolution you played my trust and I don’t give horseshit about your career! Go fuck a hedgehog, eat it and shit out on the same fucking day. Tomorrow a new era starts and prepare yourself as I am hereby vow that I am not going to care any of your bullshit! I vow that every time you come to me with a new task, I will start it WHEN I can and do it between 9 and 17 and if anyone asks I will calmly tell the hard truth about the overbred, human shaped, evolutional dead end you are...

Fuck Xcode!
Why does every single and small update need to be at least 5GB? And why am I required to update you so fucking often? You are not fixing anything, so don’t even pretend to! Most of the time it is just to support the latest .x update in iOS. Can’t be too hard to update the SDK without updating the entire shit IDE! 😡

And guess what: I JUST UPDATED YOU, SO WHERE IS YOUR FUCKING NEW VERSION??? HOW CAN I WAIT 45 MINUTES AND AFTER THAT YOU DID NOTHING!?! HOW CAN I HAVE THE SAME VERSION AS BEFORE??? NOW I HAVE TO DOWNLOAD YOU AGAIN YOU FUCKING PEASE OF SHIT 😡😡😡

Rant. (I love and respect all people! Especially developers.)

You frontend imbecils! I just can’t deal with you any more. I’ve had it.

Stop-inventing-new-components-where-there-are-fully-developed-and-working-concepts!

I mean. Just fucking stop! If I see another worthless datetime picker with an ”innovative” design I am going to hunt you down and freaking scream in your face.

And make fucking buttons look like tappable/clickable. It’s not fucking hard! Imbecils.

Oh, ooo, look at me, I am a frontend developer and I am in UX la-la land and what I am doing is sooo hard. Fuck off with your fucking moving gradients and n:th-child childish playground.

”Yeah, I exchanged the spinner…”

Fuck you. Your not contributing. Nobody cares! We’re not doing anything for the business by having a web which can be seen on a fucking telephone. EVERYBODY IS SITTING WITH SEVERAL GIANT MONITORS AND A FUCKING WORKSTATION FOR THIS. NOBODY ASKED FOR IT. AND YOU SPEND COUNTLESS HOURS ON IT.

”Yeah, I made the site work on ipad”

Please. Why? It’s not worth anything. Zero value.

”Yeah, the toggle component is now changed since we started to use the biddle-flipflup lib and it works almost the same”

No! NO! It does not work ”almost” the same. The psychology of the toggle is now wastly different. What was On before now looks like Off and it is fucking worse!!!

Imbecils. I hate you.

And no, I can’t do your fucking work! And I know that you do other non-ui stuff as well sometimes… but anyway… I have no interest to be in that clusterfuck that modern frontend is today. It was really fucking bad twenty years ago and it is just as bad today and you are not helping.

”I’ve improved the button so now it aaaaalmost does not look like a button. But I am getting there!”

Fuck you.

Why is it so hard to just build machines that work without all this ideological bullshit? Code doesn't care if politics==true. The world is scary enough without you assholes making modern life a data minefield for even the most educated experts, and taking advantage of the ignorance of everyone else. Fuck you.
I just wanna <look at web pages> without having to consider, counteract, or silently assist some fucking regime. Why is EVERYTHING this way? Everything is a back door or a data mine or a political statement? This isn't a fucking art piece! It's not your espionage tool, fucking codes in invisible ink and tiny cameras and shit everywhere! It's a <web browser>, and if it does ANYTHING besides <browse the web> that I didn't explicitly tell it to do, you better better not be the one who made it. Because if you did, you are what's wrong with the world.

So one year ago, when I was second year in college and first year doing coding, I took this fun math class called topics in data science, don't ask why it's a math class.

Anyway for this class we needed to do a final project. At the time I teamed up with a freshman, junior and a senior. We talked about our project ideas I was having random thoughts, one of them is to look at one of the myths of wikipedia: if you keep clicking on the first link in the main paragraph, and not the prounounciation, eventually you will get to philosophy page.

The team thought it was a good idea and s o we started working.

The process is hard since noe of us knew web scraping at the time, and the senior and the junior? They basically didn't do shit so it's me and the freshman.

At the end, we had 20000 page links and tested their path to philosophy. The attached picture is a visualization of the project, and every node is a page name and every line means the page is connected.

This is the first open project and the first python project that I have ever done. Idk if it is something good enough that I can out on my resume, but definitely proud of this.

PS: if you recognize the picture, you probably know me. If you were the senior or the junior in the team, I'm not sorry for saying you didn't do shit cuz that's the truth. If you were the freshman, I am very happy to have you as a teamate.

I'm not sure *why*, but I increasingly see the following pattern:

Challenge a primarily OO / imperative dev by saying OO or imperative styles aren't always a good fit, and that a stateless functional approach can offer advantages, and you often get something akin to:

"Yeah, it's new to me so I'm still working my way around it, but I get that. Makes a lot of sense."

Challenge a functional dev by saying the functional style isn't always best, and in some cases functional isn't a good fit, and you tend to get:

"YOU IMBECILE! YOU ARE SIMPLY CONSTRAINED BY YOUR YEARS OF MINDLESSLY FOLLOWING THE OO HERD! FUNCTIONAL IS ALWAYS SUPERIOR!! ALWAYS, I TELL YOU!!"

I mean geez guys, calm down and learn it's just another tool in the toolbox. I get that popular paradigms emerge and have their die-hard supporters, but I didn't even see this kind of thing when OO became the "new thing everyone needs to use for everything" in the 90's.

This happened when I finished highschool.

I was looking for a programming related career at university, and I had two options: Computer systems engineering or Software engineering. I commented this to my mom.

Me: Mom, this university offers Software engineering. The thing is that the campus is 1 hour from the city and it’s a new career, so I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not.
Mom: Why Software engineering? Don’t you want to be a developer?
Me: Yes, that’s why I was thinking of taking Software engineering
...
Mom: Is not “Software” what is inside the computer? (Inside the chasis on desktop computers)

I started laughing so hard 😂 and, of course, I ran away

I don't get people..

He is a good person and and realy tries..

Tries what?! To annoy coworkers that have to fix every single thing he does?!

Some people will justify anything with 'he is a nice person and tries hard'. WTF?!

So if someone is a nice person, likes to talk a lot, has 'good' social skills but writes crappy code he doesn't test at all.. or tests and see that it's glitchy and still doesn't fix it.. so he is a good worker for that?! Dafaq?!

So if he is a 'lovable' person, he deserves to be here, doing more damage than helps.. he deserves to have a job, with same pay (or even more) than me?! WTF?! How?!

Why is this ok?! If we were heart surgeons and he killed a person or two due to lack of skills or negligence, what would happen?!
He'd get fired on spot!! Why can't it be the same with devs?!

Why on fucking earth do we need to put up with people who try their best and fail?! Especially if their best is lowest of all, lower than the 'I don't give a fuck, just doing sth so the boss stops nagging'?!

Fuuuuuuuu!!!!

But ok, some people are not cut out for some work, I get it.. but why the fuck do other people justify that with 'he tries'?! Dafaq?!

Maybe next time 'I'll try' to perfom brain surgery on you..and you'll end up a fuckin plant.. is that ok with you?! I'll be trying (not really) and do my best (well I will try not to use a chainsaw when cutting open your head).. will that be ok with you?!

Fuck!!

10 year anniversary 'celebration' for a couple of employees (one dev, one a DBA) and the VP of the department was saying kind words about them, talking about the 'good old days'.

VP to the DBA: "I apologize, when you started, you walked into my database architecture. I didn't know that much back then and never thought about the architecture much beyond a few years. Its amazing my design has lasted over 20 years and triple digit business growth..blah blah blah"

Inner voice: "Mother F-er!...My database was designed IN SPITE of your meddling and demanding to create 1,500 field tables. Shut the F up you egotistical bastard!"

I can't even count how many times I had to stop him from, for example, adding a 'ProductID' field to a Customer table.

Me: "Why did you add a product id field?"
VP: "How else will we know what product the customer wants to buy?"
Me: "You mean like a wish list? What if the customer wants more than one product?"
VP: "Oh, that’s easy, we'll create more fields when that happens. ProductID2. Microsoft made it really easy to add fields."
Me: "We already have a wish list table schema. Customer can have as many wish lists and as many products as they want."
VP: "I don't understand. All I want is a field for me to store the product I'm buying. I don't know why you make this so hard, its just one more field."

Now the VP is bragging all the success was due to his expertise?! Gaaaaahhhh!

I quelled my rage with ample quantities of donuts, juice, and chocolate milk.

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AAAAAAAAAAARRGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm gonna break this laptop in half if I will not get a break from Windows!

I'm running it in a VM and STILL this fucker gets on my nerves SO FUCKING HARD!!!

1. CPU% 100%. Laptop fans are spinning so hard it's ready to take off
2. My hands are on the laptop. THey are HOT from the heat from inside. Hell that's uncomfortable!
3. ctrl+shift+esc to see why is cpu% 100%. It's something called WMI Host something. Kill that mthrfckr!
4. Process respawns immediately and goes up to 100% again. I have already increased handles limitation for that service a few weeks ago. Like 20x more than it was before!
5. website in IE
6. does not seem to be responding
7. hit f5. Nothing happens
8. Hit refrech buttong on the toolbar. Nothing happens
9. Place cursor at the address bar and hit ENTER. Nothing happens.

Meanwhile my hands are burning.
WHAT THE FUCK!!!

What kind of idiotic system is that!! My asshole is a better OS than this piece of SHIT!

AAAARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH#@ŦŊæ¶đ@#ĸogęq j

I'm super pissed. Better keep a 30-40 meters distance from me so the things I throw at you would not hit your ballz!

Now that I come to think of it, the only times I am THAT pissed is the times I am using windows. Srsly.

So I need to let off some steam, let me know if you think I need to calm down. Personally I'm just having a hard time understanding my team lead.

So I've been trying to update our codebase for the past two months so we run tests against the latest versions of each respective major browser. I've also been trying to cleanup our code and split it into logical modules.

Need I add, according to Bitbucket, I've written over 80% of our code on our 4 projects with 4 team members including myself.

He's out for a week, so I decide it's fine time to get some work done -- which is ridiculous in itself. I finish, add unit tests for crap I missed because he kept shutting down my PRs for shit he couldn't understand.

He tells me on Friday, when he got back, that he'll be declining my pull requests because my code is too complex -- my team lead -- thinks list comprehension and OOP in Python is too complex. Doesn't understand why we need to have pep8 lint tests, or why we can't just export one giant monolithic client package with over 3k lines of code.

Is it worth arguing or should I just let my department head know I can't work on this team anymore? He won't get talked to or fired, he's been at my company for 6 years and he's in the inner circle.

It's the 21st century. We have this amazing thing called the Internet. It's literally at our finger tips. Any information you want can be found with the tap of a phone screen, and the information will be presented to you in less than a second.

Why is this concept so fucking hard for people to comprehend? Instead of asking me "How do I write a resignation letter?", search the damn internet for resignation letter guides. Like Jesus Christ, it's not that hard of a concept to comprehend. Especially when you've basically grown up with the internet in our lives.

WHY???
WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU SO FUCKING SURPRISED SHIT HITS THE FAN EVERY GOD DAMN TIME A CHANGE IS MADE IN YOUR LIMPING SYSTEM?
YOU GAVE NO FUCKING SPECIFICATIONS NOR ANY CARE TO DECIDE ABOUT WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT IN IT.
EVERY TIME I SEE THE CODE I GET EYE CANCER, DEBUGGING THIS SHIT IS AS HARD AS FINDING THE FATHER IN A HOBO STREET ORGY
AND YOU FUCKING THINK ADDING FEATURES INTO THE SYSTEM UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES IS SO GOD DAMN EASY.

I hope life's god damn dandy for you, get fucked with a pipe bomb.

Oh, hello DevRant, sorry for sitting on the fence for the past months.

SUNDAYS ARE THE WORST!!

Normally it’s the weekend but recently it’s just so stressful!

It’s like you can’t even relax because you’re supposed to be preparing for the week ahead!

It doesn’t feel like the weekend anymore!

Why is planning and prioritizing
So MF Hard for me!?!!!!

Why did my brain cope with stress and trauma by simply checking out & spacing out!?

I got so good at it that I find it hard to bring my focus back—it takes soooo much effort to do what i need to do

I’m So Freaking TIRED.

Why are people complaining about debugging?
Oooh it’s so hard.
It’s so boring.
Can someone do this for me?

I honestly enjoy debugging and you should too..
if it’s not your code, you’ll get to understand the code better than the actual author. You’ll notice design improvements and that some of the code is not even needed. YOU LEARN!

If it’s your own code (I especially enjoy debugging my own code): it forces you to look at the problem from a different perspective. It makes you aware of potential other bugs your current solution might cause. Again, it makes you aware of flaws in the design. YOU LEARN!

And in either case, if it’s a tricky case, you’ll most likely stop debugging at some point, refactor the shit out of some 50-100 line methods and modulize it because the original code was undebuggable (<- made up a new word there) and continue debugging after that.

So many things I know, I know only because I spend days, sometimes even weeks debugging a piece code to find the fucking problem.

My main language is java and i wouldn’t have believed anyone who told me there’s a memory leak in my code. I mean, it’s java, right? We refactored the code and everything worked fine again. But I debugged the old version anyway and found bugs in Java (java 6.xx I believe?) which made me aware of the fact that languages have flaws as well.. GC has its flaws as well. So does docker and any other software..

Stop complaining, get on your ass and debug the shit out of your bugs instead of just writing it in a different way and being glad that it fixed the issue..

My opinion.

Security lifehacks 101

Why pay for password managers? Just use one secure password for every service you use! Password managers are really designed for fools who don’t know that you can just use one password for every service and who are ready to pay for that shit.

The best practice is to use your name starting with a capital letter + your main credit card number + CVC code from the back of that card as your go-to password. It’s long and hard to bruteforce and you can remember everything that way! You just need to remember that one password and you’ll always remember your payment info! No need for apple’s bad Apple Pay which is not so secure after all like everything else that Apple offers.

WHY THE FUCK DO MY TEACHERS KEEP USING SHITTY TRANSLATIONS FOR PROGRAMMING CONCEPTS?! Like dude, everything related to programming is in english, just use the fucking terms in english for fucks sake. There are some words like "array" that fit into portuguese sentences without needing translation, so why translate it?

Why do you use acronyms in portuguese? People in the Database Systems class will later read a lot the acronym DBMS but won't know what the fuck that is because they teach the acronym SGBD, which is a translation.

It's so cringy and useless, so many terms the students will have to translate back to english when they get out to the real world because everything related to programming is in english.

"oh but what if the person doesn't know english" you don't even have to know english, just associate the concept (which will be explained to you in your language) with an english word. Also if you don't know english you'll have a very hard time, so I'd suggest taking english classes as your electives.

Ok I'm done, I got it out of my system.

Why you should always backup.

Nearly a year ago I developed a whole project (iOS, tvOS, watchOS), but I never backed it up because I had a recent machine and thought the chance that something happens to the disk is so small I didn’t backup. But then my mac didn’t start correctly. So I needed to reset it. Lose the project, some other files but not much else. Then I recoded the project and backed it up on multiple places. But a little later, I was writing another app, again didn’t copy again... This time I deleted the wrong folder and deleted the trash, was gone too. So from then I learned to copy everything I coded. All projects I work on, I keep a copy of on an external disk, GitHub and Bitbucket. Assuming they wont crash all at the same time 😉.

So I recommend everyone to backup all your code. Even if it’s only 500 lines. Losing it is hard...

My best code review experience?

Company hired a new department manager and one of his duties was to get familiar with the code base, so he started rounds of code reviews.
We had our own coding standards (naming, indentation, etc..etc) and for the most part, all of our code would pass those standards 100%.

One review of my code was particularly brutal. I though it was perfect. In-line documentation, indentation, followed naming standards..everything. 'Tom' kept wanting to know the 'Why?'

Tom: 'This method where it validates the amount must be under 30. Why 30? Why is it hard-coded and not a parameter?'
<skip what it seemed like 50 more 'Why...?' questions>
Me: "I don't remember. I wrote that 2 years ago."
Tom: "I don't care if you wrote it yesterday. I have pages of code I want you to verify the values and answer 'Why?' to all of them. Look at this one..."

'Tom' was a bit of a hard-ass, but wow, did I learn A LOT. Coding standards are nice, but he explained understanding the 'What' is what we are paid for. Coders can do the "What" in their sleep. Good developers can read and understand code regardless of a coding standard and the mediocre developers use standards as a crutch (or worse, used as a weapon against others). Great developers understand the 'Why?'.

Now I ask 'Why?' a lot. Gotten my fair share of "I'm gonna punch you in the face" looks during a code review, but being able to answer the 'Why?' solidifies the team with the goals of the project.

Fucking hell everything in java is so annoying, confusing and hard to get working. I just want to use JavaFX, why do you require me to sacrifice a lamb in order to do so? It might be my fault though, but c'mon, I don't want to spend 2-3 hours reading through shitty documentation in order to understand how maven works and what the hell Gradle is. Why can't it be as simple as adding a module name to a config file, like in Rust's Cargo? Even using intellij to acquire JavaFX and set it as a dependency doesn't work, it gives me some weird "JavaFX not configured" bullshit error. What the fuck, you're a library, you shouldn't need anything else ffs

Today I learned why it’s so important to have life outside engineering (better put, I remembered this).

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been working hard to catch some deadlines, contributing to a large oss project. Getting up at 4am, working with the team in my timezone, having some time with family then working with people with 6-9 hour difference was extremelly challenging and I was so tired I literaly was a fucking pain to bear with.

Today, on Saturday, my wife started cleaning the bathroom sink drain. You know, started... “won’t fix” was not an option. First, the dirt and the smell, mmmmmm, you just have to love it. And then the thing collapses (yes, I was optimistic, trying to clean it just partly - I learned not to fix if it aint’t broken, I wonder where).

It’s of course built of trivial parts, but the water just finds its way. Needless to say, I am afraid of it :). In the end, it got resolved. Just as any bug we squash - with some anger and plenty of dirty words.

During the whole thing, I thought to myself, that all that stress at work is quite bearable; it put everything back into a perspective. Great feeling!

Fact, that I am making websites does NOT mean, that I will make a website for you for free. Why it is so hard for people to understand?

Why is Drupal so hard to learn?!!!!!!

It feels like you are learning an entirely new language. Yes it makes hard things simple, at the same time making simple things hard to accomplish.

And also modules are buggy, you would fix bugs instead of doing your tasks.

I want to learn Drupal but I guess it is not friendly for beginners like me.

One night, after one very stressful week of production code fixes (I was working on a game with some friends and I created the network infrastructure for P2P and database communication from scratch), I was at my gf's house. After we fell asleep, I stood up and screamed right at her something like "I fucking already told you how X works and how to communicate with Y. Learn to write code properly and after double checking yours then you shall ask me for a non-existing 'bug' fix. Learn how to properly write event based code and use polling you moron!". After that I turned to the other side and fell asleep immediately.
When I saw her the next morning sleeping in the couch, I could not understand why... Only after she described to me the whole incident I started laughing.
After that I just took two weeks off the project and after that period I never actually worked the same way (so hard) in my free time with them.

An online community I've been part of for years has seen a lot of popularity/hate overnight due to a new policy. The influx of new people who want nothing to do with us but just drop by to troll and be cunts is impressive. Also, a significant amount of bots. I want my online home back :( I'm for the new policy and very much against these new clowns who don't really have any reason to be on our page. Before anyone yells gatekeeping, it's a site about knitting and crochet. Why would you go there if you don't know either craft and have no desire to learn or talk about those? So disappointed. I hope it brought new crafters in and that the trolls will go away soon. It's been such a nice place for so long with barely any idiots because it was reasonably small.. And now look at this mess. I logged in to 20 friend requests from people I don't know and am almost certain aren't real people.

Why is it so hard for humans to accept that some people may disagree with them and that's okay?

"Why are some features done very fast, and some very slowly?"
Well you see, I'm nothing more than a punny human. As such, there's a ton of stuff that I don't know. Even worse, human beings have this defect of rarely being 100% efficient, so my performance may vary a bit.
It may be hard to understand for a manager, as lizard people are quite a different species.

Why is whatsapp just AIDS?!

The privacy thing is big but let's take a look at the app.

It's the only messenger app I've ever used that forces you to save incoming images to your gallery if you want to see them, like wtf?

The UI looks like shit and it's kinda hard to understand from a UX perspective, for example read receipts which Messenger does beautifully. Facebook owns WhatsApp so A it's not really a better choice than fb messenger and B it basically has a shit quality application compared to Messenger. The messaging experience in sketchy Chinese dating apps is better.

Also it basically hacks your phone. It turns on notifications and permissions by itself even when I explicitly turned them off, and sends me notifications for muted conversations.

Speaking of notificatikns. Every time I get 1 notification, notifications from every single chat even an unread messages from 3 years ago gets sent to my phone.

It guzzles battery like a monster.

And they have basically formed a cult in the indian community, so now everyone thinks its the best and no one uses anything else because "it's so convenient" which it's NOT. It has a terrible interface, and the only thing I like about it is the fact that it being so shit gives me an excuse to uninstall it and ignore all the fucking spam on there.

Honestly, the app needs to die ASAP because it is frankly the shittiest of shittiest messaging applications.

To all frontend webdevs here:
Explain to me how do you cope with all this insane clusterfuckness of frameworks, tools and js libraries.

Why is it so hard for a beginner like me to learn webdev? Android and backend are much more logical and sane. Even Node.js is pretty dope.

Client comes to me.

Client: So my business is colour matching, people visit me and I help match outfits they should wear that works with their hair and eye colour etc.

Me: Ok... and?

Client: Well. I'd like to do this online, someone sends a photo in and I assess it and send them a colour palette back.

Me: Right... How are you going to calibrate this?

Client: What do you mean?

Me: Well, it's a nigh on impossible task to ensure the exact tones and hues they send you in their photo to what you see, and likewise what you send back might look very different based on their brightness and contrast. Colour science is actually quite hard.

Client: But I don't understand they just send a picture right?

Me: Yeah, they can send one, but are you going to have a consistent baseline for your laptop, can you guarantee the brightness is at the same level each and every time?

Client: No... Why would that matter?

Me: I'm bored now, I'm not gonna take this project.

Fuck google cloud platform. My server has been down for last 4 days. Stupid reason google gives me is that it does not have resources available in my zone. Why the fuck do you start a hosting company if you cannot provide RAM and CPU. On top of that their support is so bad that after 20 emails, 4 chat tickets, 3 phone calls nobody knows the issue I am facing. They just give the links to their ultra stupid documentarion.
Now all my 6 projects are down. Clients are getting impatient. I cannot do any work and googles support is the worst.
They dont even want to understand the issue, dont know how they will solve it.

I have created AWS instance now and migrated to AWS. But i have old backups which are useless on AWS. To get the latest backups i need google cloud instance to get started but stupid google does not have resources. How hard it is to add 1 CPU and 1GB RAM?

!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...

Why do websites have to make their html so fucking hard and complicated to read with something like beautifulsoup. Like I just want to scrape your data. Fuck your embedded iframes and div lists. Why must you do this I JUST WANT YOUR DATA

*flashback to days of windows xp*
Just finished formatting and installing xp on friend's trash pc cuz the os was compromised due to a shitload of viruses. Notice that other partitions might still be infected and i don't have an antivirus on me.
"Big boi Ill be back in an hour, just whatever you do, don't open ANY drives no matter how urgent it is. Just Don't do it or i won't be able to help you"

Come back and VIOLA this worthless trash avocado opened a drive to play a game and d pc was infected. Again. Back to square one. It almost broke my heart. Almost.

I remember that day well. I was 15yo and hopeful. That day marks d start of my hatred toward tech incompetent people.
SO FKIN
A N G E R Y

So today
College
My classmates stink of incompetence. I'm not that smart in fact i consider myself to be a noob among devs but seeing ppl that are several order of magnitudes trashier than me breaks my heart and makes me soo Fkin

A N G E R Y

Hey you cunt of a skunk, WHY can't you even compile a fkin cpp file without an IDE what the fuck is wrong with you? What do u mean ur program isn't compiling? Well it literally says there syntax error on line 15 congrats u moron u fkin spelled else as esle. Why shud I waste my time on stupid Shitty ppl like u huh?

And waddup mr shithead.No. Not gonna help you partition ur drives and install a fkin linux just cuz ur too lazy to google it urself.
And if i refuse to help cuz im working on my shit then I AM D BAD GUY? Stop bitching about me u lazy bastards get ur lazy arse off and read the fkin book. Watch a tutorial or sm shit why the fuck can't u understand YOU LITERALLY PAY TO COME HERE AND YOU AREN'T EVEN TRYING TO LEARN THE BASICS GOOD LUCK GETTING A JOB YOU WORTHLESS CUNTS.

Now now all the poison is out i can finally focus on improving myself and stop giving a fuck about them. Its hard to be calm and cool when ur surrounded by ppl like this all day. Even harder when there is almost noone that you can look upto. All this time, there's only one thing I've learnt- in a place like dis, being an asshole is better dan being polite.

I am working on an open source game project, and the most common way to draw things is using a class named ManagedSurface. The class is otherwise awesome, but it has a method called getBasePtr(x, y), which gives you a pointer to the requested coordinates. Fair enough (this is C++ without STL by the way).

But WHY THE HELL CAN I REQUEST ANY POINTER THAT I WANT, EVEN IF IT'S OUTSIDE THE SURFACE? Other cointainers have sanity checks, asserts and such, and the surface KEEPS TRACK OF IT'S WIDTH AND HEIGHT.

WAS IT SO FUCKING HARD TO ADD assert(x <= w); assert(y <= h);???

I spent 3 days on valgrind trying to find a heap corruption that manifested at random points in the code.

FUUUUCK!

On the bright side, I learned how to use valgrind (which is awesomely awesome).

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.

A story from around 2005:

Customer laying out specifications: “We expect this software to need to last 25 years or so, and it will need to keep historical file processing data by dates for at least that long, assume storage is no issue.”

Devs at the time: “look best I can do is support that start with 200 or 201, anything else is really too much to ask. Also understanding how to work with dates at all and not just string manipulation is waaaaayyy hard yo.”

Fuck you lazy motherfuckers. This is why people thought Y2K would be a problem.

Issue or Error? Rant story time!

I was working on a windows desktop app, and everything was ok, you know, tests completed succesfully, all in time, etc. The problem was when we showed the demo to one of our clients. He saw several screens and we explained all the features to him.

Client: *Sees a Error pop-up indicating that a remote service is temporarly unavailable (what it has to happen in order to show him how the system would warn him when an external service is out of service)
Client: What’s that?
Lead dev: What do you mean?
Client: Yes. That’s an error pop-up
Lead dev: Yes, it’s a message that tells you that there was an issue connecting to the bank service
C: No, no and no. Please change it
L: Why? Don’t you want the system to tell you when there is a connection issue and why is that happening?
C: Yes, but my employees could lost their minds because of this class of messages!
L: So...?
C: You have to change it
L: Ok. What do you want to change?
C: First of all, don’t put an “Error” icon, put an “Warning” icon, and instead of “Error” title, put... “Issue”
L: “Issue?”
C: Yeah. Don’t put the “E” word, if the users see an “Error” message, they could think that the program doesn’t work, even if it does work.

We all though “WTF?!”

To make the story shorter, we changed all the pop-ups. That took two days.

Is that correct? I know that “Error” sounds hard but, seriously? “Issue: The remote service is not available, contact your bank?”

Me: Ok time to save money, have a trip to melbourne coming up, save for a house, car and wedding... Brilliant...

Internet: Oh hey you know how you wanted a smartwatch that was not sporty looking and has NFC, heres the Ticwatch C2!

Me: I hate my life...

Internet: also heres some of the programming theory books you wanted on sale!

Me: starts tying noose

Why must saving money be so bloody hard when everything you've wanted just pops up .-.

This whole programming profession sucks! Programmers suck! Managers suck! Companies suck! Products suck!

Why is it so hard to organize your stupid code at least a bit?! No, it’s not deadlines, just write a block of code and give it a meaningful name, a function, a method, a comment, so many options, so little fucks given. Give things a meaningful name instead of whatever came to your mind that moment. There’s no excuse! No, just leave it to the next guy, and he’ll leave his trash for another one. And then we complain and make memes about it. Fuck you all!

There’s no purpose or vision of products, managers sweep problems under a rug, executives do whatever they do, as long as some money is pouring in, just keep pedaling semi-mindlessly. Spin the wheel you little hamsters until you drop, there’s enough hamsters out there.

It’s just a clusterfuck of small, selfish interests and egos, a mud of meaningless and unnecessary problems that need not be there.

It’s not the workload, it’s the stress! The stress of bullshit, and constant problems that can be avoided if everyone did their job at least half-professionally. Not just programmers, everyone!

Im forced to work with c++ on windows for a course.

0) c++ is fucking unusable without a central repo for managing dependencies. Maybe im just too used to maven but you shouldnt be downloading dll files in 2018.

1) visual studio can go suck a fat one. I got a fairly fast pc and it takes fucking forever to load anything. For comparison, eclipse with all my plugins (and i have a lot) loads in ~10 seconds, vs2017 does in 35.

2) why the fuck is there no cross platform compilation for c++? Its supposed to run on everything right? Whats so hard about porting a fucking linux compiler so i dont realixe i have .exe files when i want to work with my laptop on the bus?

3) c++17 (? Or whatevers the newest) syntax is like a deep barf on a hot summer day after eating a whole watermelon. Its fucking unreadable and autopointers simply dont work. And its not even my lack of skill this time, its the code that the other members used and it worked for half of them.

So....
I was asked to transfer a spaghetti Android/iOS project to xamarin for a bank client yesterday because "that's what they use".

This is a crm/loyalty app that has been around for 2+ years now (you can imagine the mess). On top of that I have no knowledge of c#, .net or xamarin.

So I ask: "When is this supposed to be delivered?"

Boss: "It was scheduled for 2 weeks ago but let's say 2 weeks from now"

Me: "..... This is a huge remake it won't be even close to ready in 2 weeks"

Boss: "Let's check on the progress in 2 weeks and see how it goes"

Why is it hard for bosses to provide an actual timeframe???

He's been pulling the same crap with junior devs for years and of course they get nervous and create more spaghetti code...

Anyway long story short (not) I have an interview Monday!

Let's hope it's not more of the same!

P.S.: to junior devs: When you are given a deadline... IGNORE IT.

Clojure developers: why has our awesome language not taken the world by storm? how do we get new developers interested in Clojure and Lisp! its not as hard as people make it out to be!!

Also Clojure developers: Yeh so we know you are all probably not used to an editor like emacs *crowd looks in confusion*....BUT YOU NEED TO DOWNLOAD EMACS, INSTALL ALL THESE PLUGINS, MAKE SURE THAT THIS SHIT CALLED CIDER WORKS AND LEARN ALL OF THSE CTRL+<Fuck-Mx-You> COMBINATIONS!!

As someone that has been in the community for so long...I can't with the mentality of some of these people, and it scares me because I fear for Clojure disappearing.

about 2 weeks ago my mom's friend's family visit our house. one moment they introduce their brilliant son going to take Computer Science Major, and they didn't understand why, and apparently they are some kind of ignorant family. So my role here are to advertise and promote the world of CS (since i know their son are good at programming). one moment i am diving to deep into my own speech, i am like :

"I believe you guys using facebook, and Whatsapp all the time **give a smirk and sarcastic look* (which they actually did), that is our work there. and maybe you (my mom's friend) love to play candy crush with my mom, yes that is also our work, and we got a lot of money from you buying the candy to unlock the hard level (the microtransaction thing) MUAHAHAHAHA !" ---

and yes i am laughing like a monster in a film. and suddenly that becoming the most awkward thing i ever had.

and i don't know should i feel bad or not introducing CS like that.

-_- every time I use windows recently, I'm reminded of why I haven't for years... I swear, the simplest things are so freaking hard to do. It's like, windows doesn't support W, but blog post A references program B, which converts Z into Y, and after spending 3 more hours googling I find programs C and D, which convert Y into X, and then X into W. Were you able to follow along? Yeah, neither can I. The logo comes up and I immediately get PTSD and start falling down Alice's rabbit hole only to realize I've just wasted 5 hours of my life...

Unfortunately, ASUS is horrible and refuses to make even the most basic, minimally-functioning Linux drivers, or provide anybody with the resources to do it themselves, and they put everything on GPIO chips capable of frying the laptop!!! I'm so freaking done...

I feel like an adult locked in a child-safe playroom full of baby toys...

Why am I sad, depressed, demotivated, you ask?
Because I was asked to create-react-app with nodemailer, it worked well on heroku, YAYYY MEE, "

"NOTHING GOES WRONG IN DEPLOYMENT FUCK YEAH"

Little did I know that was a "demo" for the business people, My superior / manager/boss wants me to deploy on 1and1 service provider,

> Okay 1 and 1 service provider does provide Nodej, so it shouldn't be hard.
> Turns out it is a Windows hosting server IIS 10 without URL Rewrite.
> *INTERNAL SCREAMING*
I went up to him to talk about this issue and requested to let me talk to 1 and 1, and get this sorted

> But bro, if we cannot fix it, I think they also cannot fix, probably.

*INTERNAL SCREAMING AT PEAK*

I just want URL Rewrite installed on IIS10 so that I can move on to the next project.
A little background for this project
> No support from him during development.

> I personally used HD Images, because why not?

> Website seems slow because of HD Images, and now he complains about it.

You fucking (managers) want a website to be scalable and fast and yet you choose to focus on B U S I N E S S instead of support the real guy.

I'm fucking sick and tired, it took me 24 hours figure out the issue because there is nothing on 1 and 1 support/ forum/help center.

Another 24 hours to try and fix, yet no luck.

I'm gonna finally point the domain name to heroku. Fuck, I'm so fucking done

So yeah XML is still not solved in year 2018. Or so did I realize the last days.
I use jackson to serialize generic data to JSON.

Now I also want to provide serialization to XML. Easy right? Jackson also provides XML serialization facitlity similar to JAXB.

Works out of the box (more or less). Wait what? *rubbing eyes*

<User>
<pk>234235</pk>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groups>
</User>

Why is my groups property (java.util.Set) rendered as two separate elements? Who the fuck every though this is the way to go?

So OK *reading the docs* there is a way to create a collection wrapper. That must be it, I thought ...

<User typeCode="user">
<pk>2540591810712846915</pk>
<groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groups>
</groups>
</User>

What the fuck is this now? This is still not right!!!

I know XML offers a lot of flexibility on how to represent your data. But this is just wrong ...

The only logical way to display that data is:
<User typeCode="user">
<pk>2540591810712846915</pk>
<groups>
<groupsEntry typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groupsEntry>
<groupsEntry typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groupsEntry>
</groups>
</User>

It would be better if the individual entries would be just called "group" but I guess implementing such a logic would be pretty hard (finding a singular of an arbitrary word?).

So yeah theres a way for that * implementing a custom collection serializer* ... wait is that really the way to go? I mean common, am I the only one who just whants this fucking shit just work as expected, with the least amount of suprise?
Why do I have to customize that ...

So ok it renders fine now ... *writes test for it+
FUCK FUCK FUCK. why can't jackson not deserialize it properly anymore? The two groups are just not being picked up anymore ...

SO WHY, WHY WHY are you guys over at jackson, JAXB and the like not able to implement that in the right manner. AND NOT THERE IS ONLY ONE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT!

*looks at an apple PLIST file* *scratches head* OK, gues I'll stick to the jackson defaults, at least it's not as broken as the fucking apple XML:

<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>PayloadOrganization</key>
<string>Example Inc.</string>
<key>PayloadDisplayName</key>
<string>Profile Service</string>
<key>PayloadVersion</key>
<integer>1</integer>
</dict>
</plist

I really wonder who at apple has this briliant idea ...

Right, that's fucking it. Enough. I'm all for learning new technologies, frameworks, and development protocols, but my time on this earth is limited and at the end of the day if I'm having to spend DAYS AND FUCKING DAYS just scouring through obscure forum posts because the documentation is shit and just hitting ONE FUCKING PROBLEM AFTER ANOTHER then there comes a point at which the time investment simply isn't worth it. I HATE throwing in the towel because some FUCKING CUNT code problem has got the better of me, but fucking sense must prevail here.

Laravel fucking Mix. Do any any of you use this shit on Windows? Because I take my fucking hat off to you. I'm done with it.

Oh, so your server uses 'public_html' instead of 'public' does it? Well, of course you can just set

mix.setPublicPath('public_html'); then can't you?

No, you can't. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. Not only do you have to hard-code your fucking public directory into each specified path, additionally you have to set

mix.setPublicPath('./');

Why? Because fuck you, that's why. It took me the best part of two days to discover that little nugget of information, buried at the bottom of some obscure corner of the internet in a random github issue thread. Fuck off.

Onto next problem. Another 5 hours invested to extract some patchy solution that I'm not at all happy with.

Rinse, repeat.

Make it work with BrowserSync by wrapping your assets like so:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ mix('/build/css/main.css') }}">

Oh oh oh but "The Mix manifest does not exist"... despite a fresh install of Laravel 5.6 and all relevant node modules installed... follow some other random Github thread with a back and forth of time-consuming suggestions for avenues of experimentation, with no clear solution.

Er no, fuck off. I'm going back to Grunt and maybe I'll try Webpack/Mix in another year or two when there's actually some clear answers, but as it stands this a wild goose chase into a fucking black-hole and I've got better things to do with my precious time. Go die.

So, for the past...what, week or so? I've been working on a side project with @gianlu. It's the PretendYoureXyzzy fork - our attempt to rejuvenate an old shitty piece of software.

I had started working on a fork alone, and then he asked to team up so I was like "Sure, I got nothing better to do." So, he's working on the backend (and hooking JS up to the backend) and I'm developing the frontend.

I don't know why I thought tech would stand still. Google says they're putting MDL on life support and replacing it with a much more complex successor, MDC. It's not hard to use, but what really bugs me is the lack of notice on getmdl.io. If you are switching to another project as your main focus, why the fuck wouldn't you advertise in the most places possible?

Granted, I don't do web design and/or development on the daily. Yes, I can do it, but I'm not always as up-to-date with web technologies as I'd like to be.

However, the screencap captured is the third time I've taken the knife to the UI. MDC is great tooling, at least to me. That dialog? Not something MDL would've had out the box on the first day. You'd have to work for that.

I don't have an issue with MDC, I have an issue with the lack of PR around it.

I think the reason why git beginners have a hard time with it is because the api is a bit untuitive.

For example: if you want to "unstage" staged changes, you run git reset, and if you want to "delete" those changes from your working copy, you git checkout those files.

But then, you find out that you can do all of that if you git add . and git reset --hard.
So you're like "huh..."

And then you discover that if you end the resethard with a branch name/commit id then you also make current branch point to the commit or that branch/commit (respectively).
So you're like "huh..."

And also if you add a commit id or branch name to git checkout, you change the current branch to specified/enter detached state with HEAD pointing to that commit (respectively).

Oh and you don't use git branch to create branches, you use git checkout -b because it's a lot shorter.

So here's a rundown: git reset mutates things related to files, but also mutates things related to branches.
git checkout also mutates things related to files and mutates things related to branches too (in a diff way). Also, creates new branches.

I don't think this is intuitive. We users use the same commands for different purposes with just a different flag.
Commands shouldn't mutate different types of things. But don't composite commands (as in, "smart" commands that mutate different things) shoudln't be a flag in an existing command, it should be a single new command of its own.

Maybe if I reread the internals of git now, I'll be able to disgest the dozens of technical terms they throw at you (they are many). And in my mind, the api will cognitively fit to the explanations.

Here's another one that feels weird too.
If you want to make your changes start on top of someone else's commit, you do git rebase.
But git rebase -i can be used for that, and also to delete, modify changes or message of, reorder or combine previous commits of the current branch.

Maybe the reason why several things we do overlap with the same commands is because they internally do similar things, and while not separating those commands might make it less intuitive, it makes them more sensible? i dunno...

disclaimer: I'm not setting this opinion in stone though, and am aware that git was created by one of the most infuential programmers.

Subject: a rant for devRant

Hello,

Not entirely sure why or when exactly it happened, but after I joined mailing lists I have a pet peeve for people who don't use a proper subject line, or don't use email when I literally made a mail server for that purpose (some organizations really prefer calling apparently). Is it really that hard to summarize a message in one sentence? Hell half the time even the message itself is just a few sentences.

Also the greeting and salutation at the beginning and end of email messages. I find them so redundant. Has anyone ever gotten any meaningful information out of "Hello", "Greetings", "Dear", or something like that? Or "Best regards" or whatever. I get that it's just being polite but it's so meaningless! I really don't like using them anymore. Just a message block and who it came from, that's all it needs to me. Instead pour some effort into the damn subject, the title of whatever drivel you're putting out there! Or replying to an email *only* when the subject matter is still related! Or actually replying to the damn email if it's still that subject matter...

I probably sound like an old man, but seriously.. email isn't a hard concept once you "get it". Anyone can write a halfway decent letter, why isn't that the case for email?

Best regards,
Condor

Well what an adventure with this SSD...😑
my sis' laptop is from 2013-ish(?) and has/had a slow HDD in it. I wanted to speed it up, before her study, so I bought a new internal SSD (no new laptop wanted).
Created a bootable USB, exchanged the hard drives and install the OS on it. Seems easy enough...
The laptop restarts to finish its process ... laptop shuts down immediately, no warning whatsoever. 😳🤨
Start it up, loading screen, fan gets louder and louder ... instant shut down.😳🤨🤨.
Redo process, this time landing on blue-screen, error code critical process died? ... instant shut down again.🤔
Restart from old HDD, normal.😐
Retry with boot USB and reinstall SSD. Setup process copying files, meanwhile instant shut down.😳 Please don't tell me!😩 Since every part of the laptop was working, except the new inserted SSD, I thought "FUCK not a broken SSD!😣"
I had my own PC with internal SSD slot, so tried to find out, whether it would be broken...
All starting up fine??🤨🤨
Ok then? Finish the setup for the third time now ... everything up and running.😐🤷
Normal shut down, unplug, plug back onto laptop, it works. HOW?? WHY?? 😕
Why the fuck are you suddenly working? 😐🤷🤷🤷
That's some magic...

I once interviewed for a role at Bank of America. The interview process started off well enough, the main guy asked some general questions about career history and future goals. Then it was off to the technical interviewers. The first guy was fine. Asked appropriate questions which he clearly understood the answers to.

The next guy up, however, was what I like to call an aggressive moron. After looking at my resume, he said I see you listed C++. To which I said, yes I have about 7 years of experience in it but I've mostly been using python for the past few years so I might be a bit rusty. Great he said, can you write me a function that returns an array?

After I finished he looked at my code, grinned and said that won't work. Your variable is out of scope.

(For non C programmers, returning a local variable that's not passable by value doesn't work because the local var is destroyed once the function exits. Thus I did what you're supposed to do, allocate the memory manually and then returned a pointer to it)

After a quick double take and verifying that my code did work, I asked, um can you explain why that doesn't work as I'm pretty sure it does.

The guy then attempted to explain the concept of variable scope to me. After he finished I said, yes which is why I allocated the memory manually using the new operator, which persists after the function exits.

Einstein then stared really hard at my code for maybe 10 to 15 seconds. Then finally looked up said ok fine, but now you have a memory leak so your code is still wrong.

Considering a memory leak is by definition an application level bug, I just said fine, any more questions?

BielyApp, yeah, GOOOOOOOOD IDEA! I still can‘t understand how this works or why did a reasonable human being though that this would be a great idea! 🤔

Ok. There‘s a community that lives 4 or 5 hours from my my city. I don‘t want to offend anybody, so let‘s call them “Bielys” (just a random name, I don’t know if there’s actually a group or etnia with that name).
Bielys live isolated from modernity, they speak their own language and they don’t use technology.

A dev friend of mine was having a hard time (he got divorced and was almost in bankrupt). One day, a man asked him and another dev to work on a mobile app:

...

“BielyApp”.

...

It was supposed to be a movile app for commerce. Bielys could sell and buy biely stuff from another bielys. Well, at this point you can figure out why this was a bad idea. Anyway, they developed it. Even it’s on GooglePlay and AppStore 😱 I installed it to see if it was truth or not. Incredibly it was true. BielyApp exists and the worst thing is that you can log in with your facebook account. WTF?!

I asked to him “But why?! WHY?! They don’t even use smartphones!!!!”
And he answered “I know, but I needed the money”

I feel guilty for using YouTube Vanced and being unable to support content creators.

Shouldn't there be a feature that allows you to toggle ads on certain channels you want to support?

I really want to support such folks who are creating valuable educational content but Google being the biggest piece of corporate shit, makes me angry when it comes to compensating the creators fairly when they make Billions off their hard work.

The world is a better place because of such teachers who spend time, energy, and efforts to create valuable and useful content for rest of the world.

Funnily, back in days when we had awesome stuff, the tech was shit to document all of it. Now when we have advanced and easily accessible tech, we have shitty TikToks.

Why can't the creators of good content get more visibility and why is the world so fucked?

Why is it so fucking hard for people to follow basic rules? FFS you're supposed to stay at home to limit contact between people, that doesn't mean you can play volleyball with your friends or go to the local park! And if you decide to go hiking, choose a place where you'll be alone, not the most popular trails around the city! You're the fucking reason government needs to make new quarantine regulations every day, not this virus, and you deserve no help if you catch it! Fuck you!

I am so much stunned i cannot form a sentence on what to say. Lost 3 days trying to fix a bug on why socket.io was connecting to backend TWICE per user. I cannot fucking comprehend this. Backend works fine because via postman it doesnt connect twice. Everything works fine. 72 fucking hours waste d of my life just to find out i had to change

<React.StrictMode>
<App />
</React.StrictMode>

Into

<App />

When i tell you my jaw fucking dropped it fucking did. And it does not drop often or that easily for me. What the FUCK is react strict mode???? FUCK react. I fucking hate this piece of garbage framework. I even like nextjs better. React💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩motberfucker WHY is strict mode fucking my code what use does it have who gives a shit why does it have anything to do with websocket connection FUCK react 💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩 how does this piece of camel turd have anything to do with duplicate connection 💩💩💩💩MFKKCER this garbage doesnt exist in my beautiful angular or nextjs PLS why this cancer has to be so headaching i knew I'll get FUCKED if i dont go over a detailed course learning react from scratch. Now im suffering. Learning this garbage the hard way FUCK off

I'm trying really hard not to be sensitive, but my manager is making it difficult with their "constructive criticisms" ...

Just finished up a call with them. And I'm so tired. I'm not even angry or upset, I just feel so tired of their bullshit.

I set up a meeting as a courtesy to get them up to date on all the code changes I made. Last night I stayed up late to try and get things in before the deadline and this morning just killed me when they say.

"I don't think I should have given you this."

"I was right, you weren't ready to start doing this."
(Then don't even bother giving me anymore tasks then, I don't fucking care.)

"you clearly don't understand how branches work"
(Absolutely fucking false, I fixed that shit and am very familiar with how to understand the structure of the fucking repo)

"you are rushing and I don't need you messing up the website"
(I'm being proactive you twat, not rushing, making it very difficult for me to do the work and being productive)

Like seriously bro! Don't fucking patronize me for the work I was trying to get out. And trust me this fucking meeting is done in order to get ahead of potential issues, not a time to be condescending of my skills or lack there-of as you seem to so keenly think.

If you had this much doubt about my abilities then why give me the fucking Sr. title? Fucking trust that I'm being honest, and I'm trying to get us to a good spot, not fucking sabotage the company. God fucking damn.

I don't get it.
I tried Kotlin on Android just for fun, and it doesn't support binary data handling, not even unsigned types until the newest version. Java suffers from the same disease.
How does one parse and process binary data streams on such a high end system? Not everything is highlevel XML or JSON today.

And it's not only an Android issue.
Python has some support for binary data, and it's powerful, but not comfortable.
I tried Ruby, Groovy, TCL, Perl and Lua, and only Lua let's you access data directly without unnecessary overhead.
C# is also akward when it comes to data types less than the processer register width.

How hard can it be to access and manipulate data in its natural and purest form?
Why do the so called modern programming language ignore this simple aspect that is needed on an everyday basis?

Don't reuse your fixtures!

Each test case should be isolated. Don't ever think just because some function requires a similar input, it's safe to reuse it ALL OVER THE PLACE.

Why? Because someday, you want to change one functionality of one unit.

And you adapt your tests, fix your code, and suddenly, by changing one fixture, you break dozens if not hundreds of unrelated tests and now you have to clean up that mess.

It's even worse for functional tests with all those interwoven parts so that it becomes hard to reason about the scope of your tests when lacking proper documentation.

How I know? BECAUSE I AM CLEANING UP YOUR MESS RIGHT NOW!

I remember the first time I was experimenting with Linux and decided to install Kali Linux (was still version 1 at the time) and in the process cleaned my hard drive. I was in first year and I hadn't been introduced to git, so you can imagine what happened to my code.

Or when I dumped all my databases into one SQL file (the feature looked tasty in phpmyadmin) and then after reinstalling everything, I couldn't import back the files.

Or last year, where I was on industrial attachment. So we were to delete some data from DHIS2 manually. So as a developer I grouped all organisation units to be deleted under one parent and wrote a python script to recursively delete anything in that group. Just when I was about to show my supervisor how efficiently my script was deleting stuff, he said, "Don't delete anything yet". I hope he doesn't read this *wink*

Fast forward, last week on Friday I dropped my external hard drive. It just works on one USB port now, no idea how and why.

!Dev

Sitting in a bus on 19 hour ride with my class to England a few things to rant about came to my mind:

Why the fuck do you have to blast shitty german rap music out of your fucking JBL boxes and why do you have to turn up the volume so much that I can still hear it although I am wearing headphones, listening to music and sitting 5 fucking rows in front of you.

Also why the fuck do clocks in buses never display the right time? How hard can it be to make the clock display the right fucking time?

Another thing: why does this bus which is especially made for long rides not have a fucking trash can?! Seriously wtf?

Rants aside I am really looking forward to staying in England for a week although I won't have a computer for the next week :(

Another thing: why the fuck is the coffee you get at pull-ins so fucking disgusting ?
Like srsly, it is made by a machine and still tastes like thrown-up.

And why the fuck does everyone look weirdly at you when you buy a can of red bull but everything is fine when someone my age drinks 3+ liters of beer and then throws up? What the fuck? People look at me weirdly when I tell them that I don't drink any alcohol, heck I am actually not even allowed to do so because I am 15 and not 16 (beer is allowed in Germany if you are 16+ but nobody really cares about that). Heck where I am from they even encourage you to drink beer? What the fuck??!!

Anyway looking forward to England and also sorry about the long non-dev related rant. Just had to rant about some people and society.

P.S. do you know any (preferably free) Android apps / games where you have to code or just solve problems with logic?

anyone having the same problem of mine? I was asked to give an estimation but I suck at giving estimations!
I once gave my boss an estimation of three weeks, and completed in 1.5 weeks + including unit tests for my work O_O

The frustration that comes to each developer when he tries to write the code structured by thinking through each situations, and your team lead comes and tells you why r you doing so much validations just hard code them we need to release it today client is waiting. After 3-4 months the same team lead goes through the code and shouts at you telling why the he'll you hard coded all these, can't you write the code correctly by thinking through.

That feeling when you were so happy about react-native, and was pretty sure at the beggining about the achitecture of your app and js libs you are about to use.

Im here sitting with redux, reselect and still dont know why I cant just do a REST call and format data in the container component.
Why react is so hard, or am I dumb?

How are you? I have burning open position, are you interested?
Are you open to the position?
Are you open?
ARE YOU OPEN?

Well how would I know? You didn't tell me literally anything. Why won't they start with tech stack and salary range instead of 20 "how are you messages". Why is it so hard? Why are recruiters so hopeless, I'm never gonna get this how and why this garbage ineffective way of working is tolerated by companies.

We had today a meeting in management that ended in a discussion about prevention instead of crisis and risk management.

Or to make it bit simpler: prevention instead of treatment.

In IT / management / government, treatment is usually the way - you let the crisis happen, despite knowing it could have been prevented, and treat the damage / crisis.

Needless to say, the discussion escalated like usual.

It's funny how managers are able to put sentences like: "it's important to have quality assurance like prevention but staying within budget should be priority" (loosely translated from German, it's hard - sorry)...

You mean the budget that exploded and quadrupled in size because you dumb fuckers pay no attention to quality assurance? Or the additional cost of hardware, maintenance etc. to compensate for the fuckups regarding performance evaluation and regression testing?

"We cannot prevent everything nor anticipate everything, it's safer to deal with an estimated risk than with the unknown"...

"But we'd need to invest in ..., which reduces value"

I could give more details, but I think the point is clear... the discussion became quite heated and the longer it went on, the more I wanted to have an morphine drop with suicide option...

Why do people hate prevention so much?

Is the concept that hard to understand? You prevent things to not deal with crisis.

You invest to prevent loss.

It's just one of these weeks where the only happiness consists of tipping the delivery guy with 20 % plus and getting an honest smile.

:(

Just saw someone trying to sell an internal 4TB hard drive because they thought they ordered an external drive...

The internal drive is a server grade fucking drive?!?!

Surely you would be confused as to why the price for what you thought was an external hard drive was so damn high?!

So, by a cruel twist of fate I ended up on the front line of tech support for the app we've built. It's aimed at non-IT professionals, in general people who are not expected to know too much about computers but who should have at least two neurons to bash together in their pretty little heads.

No.

It really makes me drop my faith in humanity considerably. Clicking a confirmation link is too much. Filtering an excel sheet is too hard, despite it being their technically main work tool. Tickets are basically "shit's broken go fix". What is broken? How to reproduce it? Why do you expect the person on the other side of the screen to be a fucking diviner? I recently ran all out of dove guts to search for the answers of your questions.

That's it, where do I send the bill, to Microsoft? Orange highlight in image is my own. As in ownly way to see that something wasn't right. Oh but - Wait, I am on Linux, so I guess I will assume that I need to be on internet explorer to use anything on microsoft.com - is that on the site somewhere maybe? Cause it looks like hell when rendered from Chrome on Ubuntu. Yes I use Ubuntu while developing, eat it haters. FUCK.

This is ridiculous - I actually WANT to use Bing Web Search API. I actually TRIED giving up my email address and phone number to MS. If you fail the I'm not a robot, or if you pass it, who knows, it disappears and says something about being human. I'm human. Give me free API Key. Or shit, I'll pay. Client wants to use Bing so I am using BING GODDAMN YOU.

Why am I so mad? BECAUSE THIS. Oauth through github, great alternative since apparently I am not human according to microsoft. Common theme w them, amiright?

So yeah. Let them see all my githubs. Whatever. Just GO so I can RELAX. Rate limit fuck shit workaround dumb client requirements google can eat me. Whats this, I need to show my email publicly? Verification? Sure just go. But really MS, this looks terrible. If I boot up IE will it look any better? I doubt it but who knows I am not looking at MS CSS. I am going into my github, making it public. Then trying again. Then waiting. Then verifying my email is shown. Great it is hello everyone. COME ON MS. Send me an email. Do something.

I am trying to be patient, but after a few minutes, I revoke access. Must have been a glitch. Go through it again, with public email. Same ugly almost invisible message. Approaching a billable hour in which I made 0 progress. So, lets just see, NO EMAIL from MS, Yes it appears in my GitHub, but I have no way to log into MS. Email doesnt work. OAuth isn't picking it up I guess, I don't even care to think this through.

The whole point is, the error message was hard to discover, seems to be inaccurate, and I can't believe the IRONY or the STUPIDITY (me, me stupid. Me stupid thinking I could get working doing same dumb thing over and over like caveman and rock).

Longer rant made shorter, I cant come up with a single fucking way to get a free BING API Key. So forget it MS. Maybe you'll email me tomorrow. Maybe Github was pretending to be Gitlab for a few minutes.

Maybe I will send this image to my client and tell him "If we use Bing, get used to seeing hard to read error messages like this one". I mean that's why this is so frustrating anyhow - I thought the Google CSE worked FINE for us :/

Why don't people respond to emails? Everyone complains that things could be handled in an email instead of having a meeting. Well maybe you should start replying to my simple fucking questions so I don't have to send meeting notices. You always accept the meeting notices but you NEVER reply to emails! What the fuck people? Now I'm arranging a meeting for 15 minutes just to get a simple is yes or no question answered, are you kidding me here? You're part of the problem! You are THE ENTIRE problem!! You know how much of my time I've wasted getting no answers in IMs and emails?! Should I try smoke signals? It's not even a hard question! Will someone be at the site on the day we need them to be?! How hard is that question to answer!? Evidently im-fucking-possible!

I used to be a sysadmin and to some extent I still am. But I absolutely fucking hated the software I had to work with, despite server software having a focus on stability and rigid testing instead of new features *cough* bugs.

After ranting about the "do I really have to do everything myself?!" for long enough, I went ahead and did it. Problem is, the list of stuff to do is years upon years long. Off the top of my head, there's this Android application called DAVx5. It's a CalDAV / CardDAV client. Both of those are extensions to WebDAV which in turn is an extension of HTTP. Should be simple enough. Should be! I paid for that godforsaken piece of software, but don't you dare to delete a calendar entry. Don't you dare to update it in one place and expect it to push that change to another device. And despite "server errors" (the client is fucked, face it you piece of trash app!), just keep on trying, trying and trying some more. Error handling be damned! Notifications be damned! One week that piece of shit lasted for, on 2 Android phones. The Radicale server, that's still running. Both phones however are now out of sync and both of them are complaining about "400 I fucked up my request".

Now that is just a simple example. CalDAV and CardDAV are not complicated protocols. In fact you'd be surprised how easy most protocols are. SMTP email? That's 4 commands and spammers still fuck it up. HTTP GET? That's just 1 command. You may have to do it a few times over to request all the JavaScript shit, but still. None of this is hard. Why do people still keep fucking it up? Is reading a fucking RFC when you're implementing a goddamn protocol so damn hard? Correctness be damned, just like the memory? If you're one of those people, kill yourself.

So yeah. I started writing my own implementations out of pure spite. Because I hated the industry so fucking much. And surprisingly, my software does tend to be lightweight and usually reasonably stable. I wonder why! Maybe it's because I care. Maybe people should care more often about their trade, rather than those filthy 6 figures. There's a reason why you're being paid that much. Writing a steaming pile of dogshit shouldn't be one of them.

A new currency is emerging in our industry. It is called "blame".
Who is to blame if we don't meet the deadline?
Who is to blame if the rushed release has x bugs?
Who is to blame if nightly build breaks, because our CI-Server is an old hunk of junk and "management" didn't approve the upgrade?
Our customer blames the delay in HIS infrastructure on us, because our system requirements are too high.

Blame blame blame. This currency is the new idol of our management team. Everyone gets blamed. They manage their "blame" ledgers instead of approving the tools we need or give us reasonable deadlines. Why Lord, oh why are there SO MANY MORONS in managment? You know what, dear "managers"? FUCK YOU., FUCK YOU SO HARD YOUR MOM WON'T RECOGNIZE YOU. YOU COULDN'T POUR PISS OUT OF A BOOT WITH INSTRUCTIONS ON THE HEEL.

Yay, Dubba didnt die.
Okay, hello'ed back, lets fucking rant.

Im fucking SICK and TIRED and ANNOYED by all freaking cloud fanboys. Yeah, sure. You get scalability. You waste less resources. Sure. But it depends on use case. There is suprising ammount of services that can be run on VPS or dedicated servers that will be a lot cheaper if you just DONT run it on cloud. And dont you dare to missinterpret me. I fully recognize that there are valid uses for cloud services. But for fuck sakes, its not anwser for ALL of your needs, and it costs insane ammount of money if you use it where you should use dedicated.

WHY we, as humanity came to this place where self-claimed "proffesionals" will anwser you "cloud" before you even ask your question.

No, fuck off, take calculator and think for around 60 seconds. And than decide if you need cloud or not.

And no, this mail server will be fucking few times more expensive on cloud, and I know it becouse I have fucking calculator and I was running it past 1.5 year and actually run sometimes htop, so stop bullshitting me.

Sorry if some cloud die-hard felt offended but it is exacly how I see and feel it.
Peace.

Oh lord it's finnaly happened, I'm almost tempted to leave my retail job after 4 years, fucking head office and lazy ass managers im driving me fucking insane, they give you a 2 person job and complain when you don't have it all done by lunch.

Why must finding an enjoyable job be so fucking hard!

It's funny how you start feeling bad for the next dev taking over your project because it turned into a total spaghetti code shit show that will be impossible to maintain in the future with new features coming in.

Honestly... if a projects starts out with a certain scope which then gets extended EVERY FUCKING WEEK with requirements that can't even be met in the initial timeframe it's no wonder the code quality will decrease over time.

This just reminds me daily how important good project management (and I'm not talking about suit wearing pain-in-the-ass-managers) and the inclusion of devs in the planning process really is.

It's so fucking crazy that companies run like that with people up front that have NO FUCKING CLUE what they are doing, nor do they understand the mechanics, tech and effort that go into certain features. They're like "beep, boop, it's done by Friday you fuck!".

The funniest part of this stupid charade is that the closer we get to a new "deadline" (we will not meet the deadline anyways) the more nervous the "managers" get. WHY didn't you properly plan this shit in the first place? WHY didn't you care for the last six months where all this fucking bullshit could still have been prevented?

Meanwhile I'm just so sick and tired of this shitty project and this sucky company that I just don't have any motivation left to keep on working. It's so fucking hard and painful to work on projects that suck ass, are poorly designed. I just got to the point where coding is no fun any more. Thank god I'm out of here soon... fml

I'm writing a book that teaches everything I have learned in the past 20 years about writing small niche software and selling it.

Need some help from my fellow DevRanters.
Anyone who comments here with something constructive gets a free copy when it's done.

When I say:
"Why don't you just write your own software and sell it to end users"

What is the first thing that pops into your head?

Is it "I don't know how to advertise"
or
"that's a pipe dream"
or
"I tried starting my own business, but _______"
or
"I am doing that, i have this side project "
(how long have you spent on that side project?)

I need to know all your concerns questions fears, skepticism etc around the idea of writing your OWN software.

After 20 years I have like, so much knowledge, but it's sometimes hard to get it all out, UNLESS someone has a question or concern, then, out it comes.

So, I'm going to (hopefully) collect all the questions here ... and answer them, and it'll help me out a lot to extract this knowledge.

A lot of stuff I do without even thinking and realizing all the years it took to even know that.

What would you like to know the most?

You have the skills, you have the know how, you can probably see it in your head, so what's stopping you from making the leap?

If you've ever tried using Go plugins raise your hand.
If you've ever tried doing plugins in Go, raise your hand.
If you think that the following rant will be interesting, raise your hand.
If you raised your hand, press [Read More]:

This is a tale of pain and sorrow, the sorrow of discovering that what could be a wonderful feature is woefully incomplete, and won't be for a very long time...

Go plugins are a cool feature: dynamically load pre-compiled code, and interact with it in a useful and relatively performant way (e.g. for dynamically extending the capabilities of your program). So far it sounds great, I know right?

Now let me list off some issues (in order of me remembering them):
1. You can't unload them (due to some bs about dlopen), so you need to restart the application...
2. They bundle the stdlib like a regular Go binary, despite the fact that they're meant to be dynamic!
3. #2 wouldn't be so bad if they didn't also require identical versions of all dependencies in both binaries (meaning you'd need to vendor the dependencies, and also hope you are using the right Go version).
4. You need to use -trimpath or everything dies...

All in all, they are broken and no one is rushing to fix it (literally, the Go team said they aren't really supporting it currently...).

So what other options are there for making plugins in Go?

There's the Hashicorp method of using RPC, where you have two separate applications one the plugin, one the plugin server, and they communicate over RPC. I don't like it. Why? Because it feels like a hack, it's not really efficient and it carries a fear of a limitation that I don't like...

Then we come to a somewhat more clever approach: using Lua (or any other scripting language), it's well known, it's what everyone uses (at least in games...). But, it simply is too hard to use, all the Go Lua VMs I could find were simply too hard to set up...

Now we come to the most creative option I've seen yet: WASM. Now you ask "WASM!? But that's a web thing, how are you gonna make that work?" Indeed, my son, it is a web thing, but that doesn't mean I can't use it! Someone made a WASM VM for Go, and the pros are that you can use any WASM supporting language (i.e. any/all of them). Problem inefficient, PITA to use, and also suffers from the same issues that were preventing me from using Lua.

Enter Yaegi, a Go interpreter created by the same guys who made (and named) Traefik. Yes, you heard me right, an INTERPRETER (i.e. like python) so while it's not super performant (and possibly suffering from large inefficiency issues), it's very easy to set up, and it means that my plugins can still be written in Go (yay)! However, don't think this method doesn't have its own issues, there's still the problem of effectively abstracting different types of plugins without requiring too much boilerplate (a hard problem that I'm actively working on, commits coming soon). However, this still feels to be the best option.

As you can see, doing plugins in Go is a very hard problem. In the coming weeks (hopefully), I'm going to (attempt to at least) benchmark all the different options, as well as publish a library that should help make using Yaegi based plugins easier. All of this stuff will go (see what I did there 😉) in a nice blog post that better explains the issues and solutions. But until then I have some coding to do...

Have a good night(/day)!

Fun fact: banks won't let me take loans. Any kind of loans.

Why? It's not because I have a history of missing payment schedules. It's because I NEVER had a credit card or loans — I paid for everything with cold hard cash my whole life. But it all changed when I fried a charging controller on my laptop, so I needed a new one fast. I was in between jobs then. So, I took a loan for a new laptop, one thousand dollars, a large sum for me back then. I found a job and covered that loan ahead of schedule, in three months instead of one year. In total, my bank made a mere $5 off of me.

Banks now know I won't bring any kind of interest in whatsoever, as I never miss my payments. So, they decided to quit on me completely.

That's a proof that banks don't want you to pay on time — they want you to delay your payments and let your interest build up, so you're forced to take new loans to cover old ones. They want you to pay interest forever, having barely enough money to cover interest, but not the loan itself.

Boss: “Our ecommerce conversions in Google Analytics are less than the actual pace of orders.”

Me: “Nothing has changed in the tracking code or setup. It must be our goals setup which you have to have a Ph.D. to understand, plus whatever mood Google’s algorithms are in today.”

He’s not mad at me. We’re both just confused why Google AdWords, Analytics, and Tag Manager have to be so damn hard to get right. I’ve never been able to do it right. And most data is thrown out because people browse websites while logged into their Google Account, which makes their clickstream disappear and become unattributable because of understandable privacy policies. I don’t want my data tracked when I’m logged in either!

So now we have had to hire specialists at several thousand dollars per month to figure this out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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