The first time I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was when I met the smartest dev I've ever known (to this day).

I was hired to manage his team but was just immediately floored by the sheer knowledge and skills this guy displayed.

I started to wonder why they hired outside of the team instead of promoting him when I found that he just didn't mesh well with others.

He was very blunt about everything he says. Especially when it comes to code reviews. Man, he did /not/ mince words. And, of course, everyone took this as him just being an asshole.

But being an expert asshole myself, I could tell he wasn't really trying to be one and he was just quirky. He was really good and I really liked hanging out with him. I learned A LOT of things.

Can you imagine coming into a lead position, with years of experience in the role backing your confidence and then be told that your code is bad and then, systematically, very precisely, and very clearly be told why? That shit is humbling.

But it was the good kind of humbling, you know? I really liked that I had someone who could actually teach me new things.

So we hung out a lot and later on I got to meet his daughter and wife who told me that he had slight autism which is why he talked the way he did. He simply doesn't know how to talk any other way.

I explained it to the rest of the team (after getting permission) and once they understood that they started to take his criticism more seriously. He also started to learn to be less harsh with his words.

We developed some really nice friendships and our team was becoming a little family.

Year and a half later I had to leave the company for personal reasons. But before I did I convinced our boss to get him to replace me. The team was behind him now and he easily handled it like a pro.

That was 5 years ago. I moved out of the city, moved back, and got a job at another company.

Four months ago, he called me up and said he had three reasons for us to meet up.

1. He was making me god father of his new baby boy
2. That they created a new position for him at the company; VP of Engineering
and
3. He wanted to hang out

So we did and turns out he had a 4th reason; He had a nice job offer for me.

I'm telling this story now because I wanted to remind everyone of the lesson that every mainstream anime tells us:

Never underestimate the power of friendship.

Modern web development is fucked. Just absolutely, totally screwed up.

I want to create a simple to do list web app. Look for a tutorial: "OK guys, this is really easy, it just takes five minutes."

First step, install these:
- Git
- NPM
- NodeJS
- Express
- MongoDB
- Docker
- React

Second step, npm install about one million modules. Don't question what they do or why they're there.

Before you know it, six hours have passed and you've got a code base of 3GB and you haven't even _started_ on your app.

FUCK that shit! I can create this web app with Internet Explorer and Notepad.

Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

My employer has a dev studio in Cali.
The office is gigantic.
It has amenities.
It has a stocked fridge full of iced coffee, energy drinks, and apparently wine.
All the devs have totally enviable hardware.
And they probably earn twice what I do, or at least 50% more.

Yet they write absolute shit, never test their code, and push broken updates every day, often marked as "ready for final testing." Their codebase is full of hacks and guesses and stale cruft and worst practices. I wrote a rant recently about one of their fuckups, which involved 18 million Facebook errors per. day. So that should give you some idea as to the quality of their code, and their level of can't-be-bothered.

Again, they make 50%-100% more than I do.

Their whiny lead dev is bloody lazy when it comes to building things correctly, and totally prefers to half-ass everything and complain instead. He probably makes 150% of what I do, doing like 25% as much work, and maybe 10% as well. Doesn't quite compare though, as he's a Unity dev, not a backend dev. So his work isn't as critical.

akagdkdafavskakeuxbfh.
Bloody pisses me off.

"But their cost of living is higher!"
THEY SHOULDN'T EVEN BE EMPLOYED.

6 months ago I sold everything, quit my job, gave up my apartment and left the country with my 11kg backpack. I booked a one way ticket to South America. I wanted to travel, get lost but also finish up some personal projects and do a little tech books challenge I came up with. I learnt so much over the past half a year, it's crazy.

Not looking back. Projects paid off and it turns out that my dream company actually found me themselves without me even applying... and so still from South America I'm in final rounds of the interview! 🤗

All my worries about a gap in CV, no employment along with other problems I thought I was gonna have... It's all BS. So if anyone here is waiting for a sign. Well, this is it now. Go!

me: I don't have access to X project

PM: you don't have access to X project?

me: no, I don't have access to X project

PM: don't worry I'll take care of that

2 min. later

PM: so, you were saying ... ?

me: that I don't have access to X project

1 month later

me: I don't have access to X project

PM: you don't have access to X project?

I met my girlfriend cooking. She has no programming experience whatsoever and is quite computer illiterate. But that's fine as that's not something I need in a partner.

She regularly asks me what I'm working on. I'll try to explain it, and sometimes she definitely gets it, but sometimes she's clearly lost as fuck. She'll enthusiastically say things like "that's awesome honey!" To things that are just explanations. Sometimes it makes me laugh. Most of the time it leaves me in this weird confused state, like she's just pandering.

But I know she means well and wishes me the best. She's an amazing woman, and even if she doesn't get a single thing I try to explain, I'd much rather be with that than the "Why the fuck are you always playing on the computer?" Types of people I meet far more often.

Found this gem on spiceworks.
Link:-
https://community.spiceworks.com/to...
Below transcript was sent to poster by someone

My workplace and a twenty three year-old phone app developer:
Them (on phone): Can you send me a clicker carpet with the laptop?
Me: ...
Me: a what now?
Them: Clicker. Carpet.
Me: A ... clicker carpet.
Them: Yes
Me: What the. what is a clicker carpet?
Them: You know the clicker. The thing that moves the arrow on the
screen
Me: ...
Me: A mouse?
Them: No, the clicker. (Sends me an image of a mouse) This.
Me: That's called a mouse.
Them: I need a carpet for one of those.
Me:. A mouse pad
Them: The clicker carpet.
Me: It's a fffff. it's called a mouse pad. The clicker is a mouse. The
thing under it is a pad. MOUSE. PAD
Them: You old people and your made-up technical names.
Me: No, it's always been mouse and mouse pad.

Them: I have text messages with friends that says otherwise.
Me: The Desktop team is sending you a MOUSE PAD with the laptop.
Them: My friends and I are on the cusp of eliminating the PC with the
cellphone, by the ways. So I may only use the laptop for like year or so.
Me (under my breath): You and your friends are idiots.
Them: What?
Me: What? Are we done?
Them: Yes what?
Me: *hangs up*
Everyone was looking at me by the end of the call. I got louder the longer
I talked to this guy. When I told them about phones replace PCs, our main
dev was like, "Do they expect hours programming shit on the cellphone?
This kid is stupid."
Thanks for validating my feelings.

Me and a friend are having a bite and drink in a park.

Friend takes a picture of the donut he bought to send it to a friend. The picture takes a really long time to send so I ask how big the picture is (obviously as in size (KB/MB) and he's an it guy/programmer as well).

Friend: uhm, the donut is... Idk... *shows size with hands* this big?

Me: *facepalm*
Friend: oh, that size 😅

I ALWAYS, *ALWAYS* do a triple check before I format a drive/USB flash drive/anything.

Sometimes I think its stupid but hey, you could never know!

Just wanted to format a USB flash drive so I formatted it with gparted, didn't go well so I took it out, back in and was about to try again when... last check....

Oh, that not the flash drive, that's my main SSD 😅

CTRL+R in gparted aaaaaand my flash drive is there again, formatted, done.

Thank you, self taught triple check 😅

The company I work for...
Has:

1. No CI/CD
2. SVN instead of GIT
3. Outsourcing to India (oof)
4. No Automated Testing
5. Uses Bugnet (ancient, outdated)
6. No clearly defined code standards
7. No real documentation on the code
8. Rubbish code
9. No desire to reduce technical debt
10. Poorly maintained DB
11. Poor outdated equipment
12. A useless PM
13. Still priotizes IE support (??)

On a scale of 1 to 10 how fucked is this company and anything they develop?

So... some guy at the company I work for complains to software dept that we've broken his app.

He's saying we've removed the drop down list from this field he uses....

We're all like... there's never been a drop down list there?!

it escalates and some big-dogs get involved. One of us has to go out and see him. Turns out the "drop down list" was his browsers saved autocomplete history, and he had changed browsers.

Asshole.

I want to stop charging my e-scooter at around 85% because this will increase the battery life. To avoid always having to pull the plug at the right level, I made a stop circuit that goes between charging brick and e-scooter.

There's no processor involved, just a CMOS 555 used as inverting Schmitt Trigger which controls a power mosfet. Also two status LEDs and a start switch. The poti adjusts the cut-off level. Worked on first try, with only manual voltage and tolerance calculations beforehand!

True rant:

A student close to my place ask me to help him install some Software.

Me: Sure this does not take long.

Over to his laptop I noticed this weird popup on screen.

he said: Oh. you just need to click that away. :)

I'm clicking it away and opens up his browser typing in the address bar the search term for the software.

The Laptop quickly copy and paste my search term into a sketchy search website with not correct results..

Then another popup came again on screen.

His response: Oh. you just need to click that away. :)

I'm already internally face palming. but continue my effort to get him his software.

tried different approach on the searching part en trying to click the install button for the software..

and again. my click is high jacketed and it downloads something completely different.

and guess what.. a popup showed up

His response: Oh. you just need to click that away. :)

Stop Molesting your laptop dude! Fix your Shit I'm out!

Three months into new job and I've come to some conclusions.

1. I am nowhere near as good as I thought I was.

2. Having a super smart awesome dev review your code helps immensely.

3. It is almost impossible to learn at an accelerated rate and level up your skills without being in a conducive environment.

4. This was the best decision I have ever made.

5. I have a new appreciation for how badly people can actually drive since moving to the Bay Area.

So I have been merging loads of branches lately for our final release and now it’s affecting my dreams.

I sleep with two pillows, judge me I don’t care. One night I woke up screaming “Why won’t this merge?”

Everyone woke up and it took sometime for me to come to my senses. When my family switched on the light I saw one of my pillows partially shoved into my other pillow’s case.

I need a vacation.

If your IDE found

10 errors

and 47 warns

would you correct them

or let them slip.

YO ...

His palms are sweaty

Knees weak, arms are heavy

The tests are failing already

Code spaghetti.

He's nervous,

But at his laptop he looks calm and ready
To squash bugs

But he keeps on forgetting

What he wrote down, the whole team goes so loud

He opens his file, but the code won't come out

He's chokin', how, everybody's jokin' now

The deadline run out, times up, over, blaow!

Snap back to reality, oh there goes file integrity

Oh, there goes documentation, he choked

He's so mad, but he won't give up that easy? No

He won't have it, he knows his whole header's code

It don't matter, he's dope, he knows that, but he's broke

He's so stacked that he knows, when he goes back to his mobile home, that's when its

Back to the office again yo, this whole rhapsody

He better go capture this moment and hope it don't pass him

Note: All credits to the original owners of these phrases.

A few of Stux's !dev pet peeves

1) People that walk slow as fuck in the middle of a side walk. Like hurry uppppp. I've gotta get 0.5 miles in like 8 minutes and you blocking the walkway doesn't help.

2) People that don't understand how side walks work. Treat it like the fucking road. ⬇️⬆️ Is the pattern in which you should walk. It's not rocket science.

3) People that start walking up the bus steps as I'm clearly walking forward to get off. Ffs let me off and THEN get on you stupid bitch

4) people that bike or ride their skateboard/longboard around campus but are moving slower than I am while walking. If you're gonna do that hop the fuck off and carry the damn thing.

5) people that don't try to solve an issue with their code on their own BEFORE they call the professor over. (There goes the !dev lol)

6) people that act like their favorite musician or athelete or actor or anyone fucking famous they play kiss ass with can't be criticized. Just bc they're famous and/or good at what they do sure asf doesn't make them perfection and I retain the right to voice my opinion.

My name is Stuxnet and you're watching Disney Channel.

Multiple weird ones but one specifically where I fixed a bug over and over again and the second I pushed and deployed, the fix was gone both locally and remote.

I kept going more and more crazy and had rage attacks and such.

"Wait what, I changed and fixed this.. Let's try again"
"Huh, I definitely changed this..."
"Oh no, I fucking changed you"
"Go fuck yourself, I fixed this and pushed already, you can't just fucking disappear on me!"
"Oh yeah no of course, disappeared again, totally fucking logical. GET BACK HERE"
"I FIXED YOU A GAZILLION TIMES ALREADY, DON'T YOU DISAPPEAR ON ME AGAIN"
*NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. I. FUCKING. FIXED. YOU"

It went worse and worse for a while and then I woke up with a "....ahh" feeling 😅

Am i the only one that hates Google reCAPTCHA from the body down to the soul ?

- Click the Car
- The Blue Car
- The Truck
- The Truck Bus
- The Bus Truck
- With Blue Light
- Select the Bicycles
- Skip the house
- Find the sign
- With the blue bat
- Purple pink hat
- Click Traffic light
- We mean all Traffic lights
- Select Stores
- With Zebra Crossing
- ...
WTF!!! Just kill me already.