So today , a company phoned me for a job I applied in Jobstreet. So the conversation goes like this.

Com " Do you have any experience in Android studio? "

Me : " Yes . I develop android application, it is compulsory to know actually."

Com :" ok... Do you have experience android SDK?"

Me : " I believe you are referring to the Android studio, yes."

Com :" do you have experience in Android programming"?

Me :" Yes. I do android application for both native and hybrid. As for hybrid, I use flutter."

Com :" Ok...but I was asking about android."

Me :*explaining what I just said *

Com: " you no understand! We need android programmer! Not native or flutter programmer!"

Me *explaining what native and hybrid is (in simple terms)

Com : " it is ok then.. our company prefer those who can develop android app , not native programmer or anything flutter programmer.
"

(Btw , I transcript how exactly that person talk to me)

My question to this person is.... WHAT THE F*** IS THIS? WANT AN ANDROID DEVELOPER BUT NOT NATIVE OR "FLUTTER"? WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN ? IF ANDROID IS NOT WRITTEN IN NATIVE OR HYBRID THEN WHAT YOU EXPECT ME TO USE THEN? USING ASSEMBLY X64?

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

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

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

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

Weaklings! Robots are superior!

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

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

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

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

So I jumped into the infinitely deep shitpool called webdev.

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

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

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

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

So I became a data engineer / database admin.

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

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

Today's highlights include:

The offshore team has put code gems in production featuring the example code generated on project startup that you're supposed to delete or overwrite, an API endpoint that just returns the value 5, and various debugging console.logs. it's a delight reading their code.

My boss also forgot the meeting he called me in for so I've been sitting here waiting for 20 minutes when I could have gone home. I'm glad it's friday

Infinite loop...

Got a story assigned with no requirements listed this sprint. Since I finished the rest already I was like, lets be pro-active and see what it's about during the stand-up.

Me: Hi, I only have story X remaining, what's it about, there are no requirements listed in Jira?
SM: Yeah person Y is going to reach out to you with the reqs.
Me: Ok, when is Y going to reach out?
SM: Y doesn't have time now, will probably be in 2 weeks.
Me: Ok, so why is the story included in this sprint then?
SM: Because they want X implemented this sprint.
(Me wondering if the Scrum Master is familiar with infinite loops, thinking let's try this out)
Me: Ok, if X should be completed, can Y reach out to me with the requirements?
SM: Y doesn't have time now, will probably be in 2 weeks.
Me: Ok, why is the story included in this sprint then?

Stand-up lasted a lil' longer today... Hope the SM got the message not to assign stories without reqs or clear communication anymore.

Heck yes!

I implement a stack trace in my embedded systems!

Whenever a device crashes, it makes a stack dump in an unused part of ram.
After it has rebooted and is connected to the server again, it uploads the stack dump.

The server then opens the correct firmware elf file, walks the stack and associates the debug info from the elf.

The result? A beautiful stack trace with file names, function names and line numbers.

No more guessing where random crashes come from.

!dev

It’s sooo weird.
I’m generally not feeling happy or good or “okay”, I’m almost always rather shitty but just keep going through my day without complaining too much because that’s what most of us do..

Today, for the first time in at least one (very lonely, cold and boring) year, I went outside for a smoke and felt good. No idea why.
Everything was orangy/yellowish outside because of the clouds after the first sunny day in weeks.
Its raining slightly but not so much that you actually get wet.

I just had this feeling of “yea, that’s good enough” which I haven’t had in probably 4-5 years or so.

Maybe it’s because I got a little bit of sun for once and saw other people walking 2m around me, I don’t know..
But it felt good.

Does that feeling sound familiar to anyone or am I just finally going crazy?

I also apologise for my last 50 rants not being about dev or rant but I’m lucky to not have much to rant about in my current job 😅

!Dev

Can't stand it when you excitedly mention the Mars rover (or anything space related) to someone and they say "Yeah but what's the point you could be feeding the poor or sorting out the environment with that money instead"

...yeah, you could. Or you could be doing that with money from the army instead. Or football. Or any other popular sport. Or yaknow, you could personally be doing that rather than spending all your salary on crappy clothes you're going to throw away in a few months anyway.

And that's not even mentioning the jobs it creates, the people it inspires to go into science + tech fields, the scientific advances it makes for humanity, etc. If you're that against scientific advancement then please, by all means surrender your possessions and just go live in a cave somewhere.

I'm specialized in creating technical debt.

Basically, I rant my way in any dev specialty.
Since I never have a solid understanding of what I'm fucking with, ranting is more natural.

Ability to create technical debt is one of the most important skill, often underestimated:
- it will lead to heavy refactoring or even rewrite = more job for dev
- it will save a lot of short term effort, and luckily will produce the mid-term lock-in of the developers (more money for dev)
- it will increase billable hours to the customer. Higher the technical debt, more complex the explanation, and easier to confuse the customer.
- the best thing is that you'll never pay the debt. You'll eventually leave - willing or not - the job and you'll find some green field to exploit and create more debt.

Your daddy Johnny is pissed off again.

My therapist advised me to do some things for myself after I told her that I'm finding the simplest tasks overwhelming again. This is after a month of studying, coding, and working on some personal projects on my free time. I thought "Fine, I'll buy new clothes since I have very few of them and also get a massage."

But guess what these activities involved? People. I went to the mall and some attention-seekers yell at a high-pitched tone when their dumbass friend taps them on the shoulder. Then goes the screaming match "AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH" because they saw their friends. OMG. FRIENDSHIP! So exciting! Let's scream in public for absolutely no fucking reason because it feels so damn good when everyone turns around to look at our ugly asses.

I went to a shop and two women are talking in the most annoying fucking made-up accent I've ever heard. If you want to know, social distancing is no more than a suggestion at this point. I go to the fitting room and same women are talking loudly in that curly, rich-wannabe, bitch accent. "Emergeeeeeeerd, you lost so much weiiiight!" Then another ugly fuck man joins them and they start screaming flirtatiously, "Emergeeeeeeeerd, why are you heyyre?! Geit outttttuh! Ugh." In my head, "My pussesyyyy is so wet rightt now and my labia flaps are as green as my haeeirrrr!"

I tried to finish the day off by having some tiramisu pancake in this Japanese shop, to make up with the stress of having to co-exist with these people. Two girls sat at the table near me and started talking loudly again but some dumbass gossip. There is no way not to hear the shit they're talking about. I thought about wearing a headset but then I'd hear myself chew. Classic gossip about some other girl they know being a slut and some guy they know who is cheating on his girlfriend plus the casual sexism, "He doesn't know 'cause he's a guy." Non-stop "he's just a guy" bullshit.

I didn't finish my meal, went home, and decided that I should stick to online shopping and food deliveries. I know it's considered healthier to get out every now and then but not in this fucking country. Then I went to go get that massage in my favorite massage place. Guess fucking what? Two couples went in and started chatting and laughing loudly. Keep in mind, there are signs everywhere "Please observe silence" and it's a fucking massage place where people go to relax in peace with just the relaxing music.

Again, another set of stupid goddam gossip that just can't wait for a fucking hour. Even my therapist got pissed up and started shushing them. She did that three times and they started whispering but you can still hear it. Fucking hell, you bitches can't keep your mouth shut for a fucking minute. You have nothing of importance to say and you just ruin everyone's day. You are inconsiderate and you're all a bunch of uncivilized fuckwits.

How fucking ironic that these activities that are supposed to relax me just reminded me of the reason I was burning myself out in the first place and why I hate, hate, absolutely hate going out or doing anything that involves people.

Fuck you all. I'll get a massage at home. I'll fucking do everything at home. I can't stand you annoying fucks.

Manager: "Can we get an accurate report on how many containers we have on the Kubernetes cluster?"

Me: "Well not really since Kubernetes is designed to be dynamic and agile with the number of resources and containers being created and deleted being subject to change at a moment's notice."

Manager: "I want numbers"

Me: "Okay well if we look at a simple moving average over time, we can see how the number of containers changes and then grab a rough answer from that"

Manager: "These numbers look a little round, are you sure these are exact?"

I'm going to throw myself into a pile of used heroin needles and hope i get stuck with whatever the hell this guy has to somehow be a manager while also being this retarded.

"I keep complaining to you guys every day about this bug and nothing happens!"

Firstly, it ain't a bug. Secondly, you're not complaining, you're whining. Thirdly, complaining is a bloody limited resource. If you do it once a year, everyone's going to sit up and take notice. If you do it daily, it's just "Duncan having another moan", and the only thing anyone will do is play "what time of day will Duncan rant" sweepstakes.

PSA When someone is eating lunch in the office please just leave them the fuck alone.

I can't recall the number of times I've been literally lifting food to my mouth when someone just rocks up and starts yakking about some work related issue with zero fucking consideration for the fact I'm trying to refuel and recoup.

Today it wasn't me; I experienced this vicariously, watching my poor colleague trying to eat, then being approached by someone; then another. Moments later the poor guy had 3-4 people literally crowded around him excitedly conversing and poking questions at him. I could see he just wanted it to go away so he could eat.

So just in case this makes a difference to anyone it reaches:

If you see someone eating lunch. Show some fucking self-restraint and just leave them to it, eh? Thought for the day.

As a person who takes a lot of tech interviews everyday, here are a few thoughts

1. You DON’T need to know everything, it’s okay to say you don’t know things. Trust me, we know when you’re lying

2. Rule of thumb, the more the number of questions, the more we like you

3. We don’t mind you saying what you’re thinking when we ask a logical question. It might help us understand your approach to the problem and guide you.

4. Don’t google during telephonic interview, your stutter tells us the truth

AAARGH ELECTRON IS SO FUCKING...decently pleasant to use?

So I've been working on a FPGA based synthesizer on a Xilinx Arty A7 board (that little Artix 35T chip is surprisingly capable), and since I hate typing commands into a serial stream for anything even decently complex just like any sane person should, I needed something to build a UI for controlling it and other synth projects while I make the Eurorack compatible enclosure and knobs and stuff. I chose Electron because they said it was simple and easy to make cool looking stuff, fast.

And they were right. In like two hours, with Electron and p5.js, starting from zero since I don't know jack about frontend, I had a pretty nice UI driving the hardware synth and effects modules. Not bad. I should use this more often.

A manager who felt that it was okay to come and speak to me about something that they were unhappy with in my conduct towards a member of our team, in a public place, loud enough for others to hear.

The conduct that made the manager feel the need to do this was my response to something another team member asking me to do. I had a lot on my plate with work, and had been given at least 3 additional tasks already in that meeting and my response to having to do yet another thing for this other team member because they "hadn't any idea what to do" was simply that I was quite busy and if it wasn't high priority it could wait one week as I have 3 other higher priority tasks that week to do. This resulted in me getting a warning and in a very public place.

Shouldn't have let it get to me the way it did, but the stress I was under and the way in which it was conducted just broke me and I cried. That nearly pushed me to leave my job and industry entirely.

I made a functional parsing layer for an API that cleans http body json. The functions return insights about the received object and the result of the parse attempt. Then I wrote validation in the controller to determine if we will reject or accept. If we reject, parse and validation information is included on the error response so that the API consumer knows exactly why it was rejected. The code was super simple to read and maintain.

I demoed to the team and there was one hold out that couldn’t understand my decision to separate parse and validate. He decided to rewrite the two layers plus both the controller and service into one spaghetti layer. The team lead avoided conflict at all cost and told me that even though it was far worse code to “give him this”. We still struggle with the spaghetti code he wrote to this day.

When sugar-coating someone’s engineering inadequacies is more important than good engineering I think about quitting. He was literally the only one on the team that didn’t get it.

Dear "Create a web API with ASP.NET Core" official MS tutorial:

you betrayed me. I came to you like an innocent child and you fucked me over, you abused my trust, forcing me to follow insane instructions leading to no result other than the loss of my childhood and my day.

I feel like a child raped by some perv-priest or monster father.

I had a soul ready for a space walk,
and now I have just a hole full of your cock

The online funeral live stream just broke. The 4G* connection at the place is awful, which is probably the reason for it...
*If it even has 4G now, it definitely didn't a few years ago

Germany keeps jerking itself off how amazing our economy and science is. We're a country of engineers and all that.
Yet our digital infrastructure is a fucking joke.

Rural area? Well better hope you'll get any reception, let alone 4G.
Oh and cable connections? I've seen areas that will give you a 6 Mbit/s DSL connection.

Clients keep asking if our software will support XYZ format.

XYZ format is a proprietary format that we are not the proprietors of. Unfortunately, it has become something of a de-facto standard in our industry.

It is not practical to support the format because being able to figure it out is difficult, time consuming and not even a certainty. In fact while we have historically done so for previous versions, it has been upgraded several times so this becomes something of an arms race for us (whether intentional or not).

Responses from clients when we try to explain this vary, but a not insignificant number of them intimate that this is a failing or fault on our part.

It is pretty annoying, and considering the damage in perception it can do, is a pretty interesting and subtle form of economic moat I had not previously considered.

[9:10]

CTO (works as a team lead): You here?
Me: Yes 👍
CTO: After doing X, Y and Z I broke X. That should not happen. You do understand, that this is not a good UX?
Me (asked CTO X amount of times to hire a a good designer, because I’m not): Well, we made the backend receive Y when X is triggered so B can be passed. I can tell the user to do Y in order to do Z.
CTO: NO, you will not. Do what I’ve said.

DUDE WTF? YOU FUCKING 🐎 I WILL BLOW YOU BRAINS WITH MY MORNING NAUSEA AND DIARRHOEA. FUCKING DIPSHIT ALLOWS HIS BAD MOOD AFFECT OTHER EMPLOYEES. HOW THE FUCK YOURE A CTO.

IM NOT GOING TO REWRITE THE CENTER PIECE OF OUR APPLICATION IN A DAY, WHICH TOOK US MONTHS TO MAKE. FUCK OFF

Monday, hurray 🥳