“Yeah but you’re not a *real* developer”

Fuck. you.

I wrote 80% of this code base. I do 80% of the tickets/storyboard points. I do all of the QA. My nose is to the grindstone every fucking day honing this craft and sweating my balls off like a blacksmith staring into the red hot kiln while the sores of previous mistakes scream bloody murder from the unrelenting exposure to heat. I saw this amazing industry of opportunity, freedom and self examination and wanted in no matter what it took. I glued myself to every pithy resource I could possibly get my hands on and crawled through the muck and filth of it all until I could keep myself warm with the smallest spark of my own making. I stoked that spark until it became a fire and stoked that fire until I could set entire forests ablaze. I listened to the ungrateful people keeping warm by my combustion saying it “wasn’t hot enough” or “would have been a nicer colour if they did it” or “could have warmed up just fine jogging on the spot”. I made painstaking alterations to my ignition and watched my undeserving benefactors gradually be silenced and begin to sit quietly by the heat. I jumped into that inferno daily, was reduced to ash daily and emerged reborn daily. But you are right! I didn’t get scammed out of $40k+ studying technology in an archaic institution from instructors who don’t give a shit and answering “D all of the above” for 4+ years straight therefor my opinion doesn’t mean shit. Push your bullshit to prod and watch the server come burning out of the cloud as the apocalyptic swarm of angry tickets come flooding in why don’t you? Bet they didn’t teach you that in school. You’ve never poked around inside an open source codebase in your life. They are just a mystery boxes of magic that unless someone holds your hands with finely crafted instructions containing a 50/50 picture to word ratio you throw a hissy fit. Every problem that comes up instead of working to solve it you reflexively point to the first person in the room while thinking with your pea brain how you can possibly scapegoat them into taking the fall for whatever it is that’s come up today you couldn’t possibly understand.

Not a real developer?

Fuck. You.

Dev: Ok issue fixed, you just need to log out and back in again on your end to receive the fix

User: It’s still not working

Dev: Did you log out and in again?

User: No why would I want to do that?

Dev: It’ll reset your locally saved login information which is causing the issue

User: I thought you said the issue was fixed?

Dev: On our end yes, we just need you to reset your end in order to receive the fixed version

User: Look I have been dealing with this issue for 6 months. Fixing bugs are your responsibility. I have too much to do, you have to get this fixed. *click*.

Dev: Yeah you submitted the bug ticket yesterday night though

Email from users manager later that day: <User> is saying you are refusing to fix this bug. This is unacceptable. Fix it or else I will escalate this. Also there are other bugs we noticed today too, fixing them is absolutely critical!

Dev: …

Dev: What other bugs did you notice?

*no response for 2 weeks and then:

User: Hey you can close this ticket, the issue seems to have resolved itself.

Dev: ….muppet.

I think the weekly rants just exist because @dfox & @trogus got banned from stackoverflow and they still have questions.

When it comes to learning cutting edge tech... Go build already!

I found Rust intimidating.

I read the first few pages of the official book, got bored, gave up.

Few months later, decided to write a "simple" tool for generating pleasing Jetbrains IDE color schemes using Rust. I half-finished it by continuously looking up stuff, then got stuck at some ungoogleable compiler error.

Few months later I needed to build a microservice for work, and against better judgement gave Rust a try in the weekend. Ended up building an unrelated library instead, uploaded my first package to crates.io.

Got some people screaming at me that my Rust code sucked. Screamed back at them. After lots of screaming, I got some helpful PRs.

Eventually ended up building many services for work in Rust after all. With those services performing well under high load and having very few bugs, coworkers got interested. Started hiring Rust engineers, and educating interested PHP/JS devs.

Now I professionally write Rust code almost full-time.

Moral of the story:

Fuck books, use them for reference. Fuck Udemy (etc), unless you just want to 2x through it while pooping.

Learning is something you do by building a project, failing, building something else, falling again, building some more, sharing what you've made, fighting about what you've built with some entitled toxic nerds, abandoning half your projects and starting twelve new ones.

Reading code is better than reading documentation.

Listening to users of your library/product teaches you more than listening to keynote speakers at conferences.

Don't worry about failures, you don't need to deliver a working product for it to be a valuable experience.

Oh, and trying to teach OTHERS is an excellent method to discover gaps in your knowledge.

Just get your fucking hands dirty!

Manager: *taps dev on shoulder* We need to do B

Dev: I know, you created a ticket for it yesterday

Manager: Yeah but it hasn’t been done yet. It needs to get done.

Dev: I’m currently working on A which is higher priority

Manager: Ok but B needs to be done too

Dev: I know, it’s next on my board

Manager: I’m just making sure you are aware of it

Dev: I am aware of it, it’s next on the board

Manager: Ok but make sure you do it after A

Dev: Yup it’s next up

Manager: Ok, don’t let anyone distract you

Dev: …

Corporate IT: YOU MUST COME INTO THE OFFICE. WE JUST RECEIVED AN URGENT NOTIFICATION FROM APPLE OF A SECURITY VULNERABILITY IN iOS DEVICES. YOU HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED AS HAVING A MAC ASSET. COME INTO THE OFFICE IMMEDIATELY AND UPDATE IT.

Dev: I don’t use that mac, it sits in my office desk drawer unplugged. I’ll update it if I ever need it for anything. Which I won’t, we don’t do iOS dev anymore.

Corporate IT: NOOOOO!!! YOU MUST UPDATE IT NOW!!!

Dev: I’m not wasting time driving into the office this week. We have an important deadline we’re working on, I can’t afford to lose 2 hours to this. Plus it can’t be turned on right now, It’s been unplugged for 2 years.

Corporate IT: THAT WOULDN’T STOP A HACKER!!

Dev: …

Manager: Hey how come you left so many comments on my PR?

Dev: Well you’ve just recently learned how to code so there’s going to be a lot of things to learn beyond what you’ve picked up in your online coding tutorials. Don’t worry it’s only minor things like you put everything all in one function, left outdated comments in the code, have if statements 4 levels deep, have a console.log after every line of code some of which log .env variables, skipped error handling, cast to “any” a bunch instead of using more specific types, didn’t write any tests and some unrelated tests are now failing due to a circular dependancy.

Manager: THAT IS SO DISRESPECTFUL!!APPROVE MY PR IMMEDIATELY. IT WASN’T EVEN EASY FOR ME TO CREATE THE PR, NOW I HAVE TO MAKE AN UPDATE!? YOU’RE THE DEV, YOU SHOULD FIX IT NOT ME!! NEVER COMMENT ON ANY OF MY PRS AGAIN.

Yesterday's (scheduled and adhoc) meetings:
10:30-11:00
11:00-11:30
12:30-1:30 (adhoc)
1:30-2:30
4:30-5:00
6:00-6:20 (adhoc)

Today's (scheduled) meetings:
9:30-10:00
11:00-12:00
12:30-1:15
1:30-2:30

Tomorrow's meetings include a 1:1 with my boss who will invariably ask why I'm not done on this "should take a week" project that I've had for a week, despite that he just unblocked me on yesterday morning, and I've had nothing but meetings since...

Fucking hell.
They fill my day with shit spaced out just enough to waste practically my entire freaking day so I can't get anything done, conveniently forget this, and then have the audacity to yell at me for not finishing my tickets. Of course I didn't finish! You all were too busy blabbing at me every day for the past fucking week! (Oh, and do they listen if I have something to say? Of course they fucking don't.)

Also, as a secondary rant, the product douchebag files tickets (usually complex as hell tickets worded to appear trivial) with enough missing information to make missing large sections of them easy. If I ask him for clarification, he tells me to read the ticket, and if I insist, he gets all exasperated and quickly zooms through the site faster than I can follow, shows maybe half of what's in the ticket, and asks why I don't know how to do any of this yet. After I finish his shit ticket (and true to his douchebag nature) he blames me for missing several of those pieces he never outlined or showed, and insists that I obviously don't test anything. And because that's clearly not douchey enough, the fucking sack of shit also goes behind my back and trashtalks me to my coworkers, tells them he can't trust me to do a simple fucking thing, and that he's given up on me.

What the FUCK is wrong with these people?

Manager: As you all know I called this meeting to discuss what we will do with all of the extra resources if we are done early. I was thinking a start a new ap—

Dev: We are not going to be done early. There are two weeks left and we are way behind schedule.

Manager: Don’t be so pessimistic! You never know when or how fast tickets will be completed.

Dev: Yes I do…I’m the one doing them

My code review nightmare part 3

Performed a review on/against a workplace 'nemesis'. I didn't follow the department standards document (cause I could care less about spacing, sorted usings, etc) and identified over 80 bugs, logic errors, n+1 patterns, memory leaks (yes, even in .net devs can cause em'), and general bad behavior (ex.'eating' exceptions that should be handled or at least logged)

Because 'Jeff' was considered a golden child (that's another long TL;DR), his boss and others took a major offense and demanded I justify my review, item by item.

About 2 hours into the meeting, our department mgr realized embarrassing Jeff any further wasn't doing anyone any good and decided to take matters into his own hands. Thinking 'well, its about time he did his job', I go back to my desk. About an hour later..
Mgr: "I need you in the conference room, RIGHT NOW!"
<oh crap>
Mgr: "I spoke to Jeff and I think I know what the problem is. Did you ever train him on any of the problems you identified in the review?"
Me: "Um, no. Why would I?"
Mgr: "Ha!..I was right. So lets agree the problems are partially your fault, OK?"
Me: "Finding the bugs in his code is somehow my fault?"
Mgr: "Yes! For example, the n+1 problem in using the WCF service, you never trained him on how to use the service. You wrote the service, correct?"
Me: "Yes, but it's not my job to teach him how to write C#. I documented the process and have examples in the document to avoid n+1. All he had to do was copy/paste."
Mgr: "But you never sat with Jeff and talked to him like a human being? You sit over there in your silo and are oblivious to the problems you cause. This ends today!"
Me: "What the...I have no idea what you are talking about. What in the world did Jeff tell you?"
Mgr: "He told me enough and I'm putting an end to it. I want a compressive training class developed on how to use your service. I'll give you a month to get your act together and properly train these developers."

3 days later, I submit the power-point presentation and accompanying docs. It was only one WCF with a handful of methods. Mgr approved the training, etc..etc. execute the 'training', and Jeff submits a code review a couple of weeks later. From over 80 issues to around 50. The poop hits the fan again.

Mgr: "What's your problem? When are you going to take your responsibility seriously?"
Me: "Its pretty clear I don't have the problem. All the review items were also verified by other devs. Its not me trying to be an asshole."
Mgr: "Enough with the excuses. If you think you can do a better job *you* make the code changes and submit them for Jeff for review. No More Excuses!"

Couple of days later, I make the changes, submit them for review, and Jeff really couldn't say too much other than "I don't see this as an improvement"

TL;DR, I had been tracking the errors generated by the site due to the bugs prior to my changes. After deployment, # of errors went from thousands per hour to maybe hundreds per day (that's another story) and the site saw significant performance increases, fewer customer complaints, etc..etc.

At a company event, the department VP hands out special recognition awards:

VP: "This award is especially well earned. Not only does this individual exemplify the company's focus on teamwork, he also went above and beyond the call of duty to serve our customers. Jeff, come on up and get this well deserved award."

HR: Everyone must fill out these 100% anonymous surveys about how you feel about our company, it’s leadership, and how likely you are to leave in the next 6 months etc. Please be 100% honest, since again it is 100% anonymous. Reminder! You must use the individual links we sent to you, do NOT use someone else’s link. Oh did we say it’s 100% anonymous?

The Link:

www. surveygen .com/ companysurvey123 ?employeeName=boombodies &employeeId=6969

Dev: …

In the distant year of 2022.

Safari changes its logo to more appropriately reflect its position as the new Internet Explorer.

Chrome monopolized the spyware market and is facing another antitrust investigation.

Mozilla finally managed to fire all the developers working on Firefox and replaced them with highly trained dead monkeys.

Brave successfully consolidates itself as a cryptocurrency wallet and leaves the browser space.

Edge has two new users.

Who the **** is Vivaldi

Senior Management: We are severely disappointed in the timeliness of the two apps you built this year. You had budgeted 3 months for one and it took 4 months and the other was budgeted to take 4 months and took 5 months. We understand that we doubled the requirements halfway through and but that doesn’t take away from our need for you to deliver on time. We provided you with two extra devs on the project! We know they were novices and you had to train them from the ground up during the project, that doesn’t matter. The extra resources should have helped you but your lack of leadership ability is what caused them to hold you back. We know our other team with a budget of 6 months took 2 years on their project and was still unsuccessful but that is a different scenario! That was a pre-built 3rd party ERP plugin, way more complicated and nuanced than simply building and deploying something from scratch. Yes we’re aware your projects were the only successful tech projects at the company this year, that’s just luck and coincidence. The next app we need you to build in 6 months, no questions asked. It needs to consolidate and tie together our 3 different ERPs. Everything that we need out of these products that they don’t do out of the box we need you to wire up. We will decide the exact requirements in a month or so, for now just get started. Yes your apps changed the way we do business and allowed us to complete projects smoother than ever before while saving millions of dollars in wasteful and archaic processes that is OLD NEWS. Stop bringing it up. The successes of yesterday are the status quo of today. Don’t expect any new resources either, you clearly can’t handle them. You will now be giving status updates to 3 different managers as a corrective action to your missed deadlines in order to ensure the timeliness of future deliverables.

Dev: …

[WARNING] THIS RANT IS NOT FOR HULKS OR SHE-HULKS

Here we fucking go again, currently, the time is 1:09 am in Malaysia, while I received a Pull request, so as a senior software engineer it is my duty to review the code before approving to merge develop branch. And this mother fucker decided to do this right after our CTO warned him about his coding style. Refer to https://devrant.com/rants/4699002/... for free cancer.

Our entire team is not happy working with this mother fucker, he is too arrogant.

Btw if he wants to insult me using codes, at least have the decency to draw some UML diagram , write proper documentation and write a proper logic, isn't better?

Do you agree to this rule given by my company ?

"Employees are not allowed to create any sort of library for any language after or during working hours, whether for personal or company projects. As they might somehow expose companies code to the open-source world."

Personally, I created quite much (not that much) of library , I created for fun, today I was told to delete ALL , so those who use my package , Im sorry :(

Never understood people's fixation about my gender on this site. When I first had a female avatar, it was "Oh you're just pretending to be female for attention. Pretty sure you're a dude." Then I got a male avatar, "You have no real dick. Shame." Jesus Christ, it's just an avatar. I don't even give a fuck what you want to be, I have my own life.

I get this shit from the most mentally unstable people here who have trouble transitioning to another gender themselves and are not using the same avatar of whatever fucking genitals they were born with. They get upset for not being accepted, complain about discrimination, and some even show signs of pedophilia but they judge all the same.

Let me make this clear. I'm here to post shit and rant. Whatever crotch I have is none of your business because I will never fuck you and you will never have to look at it. This obsession makes me think how sad developers really are. You'd think that working in the tech field and being on the internet a lot, you'd stop believing and giving a shit about someone's avatar.

But whatever, man. Here's a few minutes of my day. I have shit to do.

No one fucks me better than I do. It's impressive.

I guess the worst thing about today is that I actually thought it was the best day ever and I was pumped for an hour before it all went to shit. You know, I have all these plans, things I want to do that keep me up at night. I finished all my tasks earlier than usual and thought, "Hey, I finally have time to clean-up some things, automate, build, and write some extra documentation to aid my forgetful brain and short attention span."

I made myself another cup of coffee, rested my back against the sofa, placed my laptop on the side table, and prepared to chill for a while before the meeting starts. Someone messaged me to report an issue and the plan is busted once again. This time, the issue was totally my fault. I missed a scenario for one of the components and it all came back to me that it was one of those things I said I'll get back to but never had the chance and I eventually forgot about it. Notes don't work when you fucking delete it (writes todo list, deletes todo list, tasks completed). Yes, I'm a moron, a very good one. The good thing is it's not yet in production and wouldn't be for a while.

I was prepared to post a rant when I accidentally knocked off the cup of coffee and spilled it all over my laptop keyboard, desk, and the floor. It all happened five minutes before the meeting so I couldn't attend. Oh well. The laptop didn't flinch. I don't know where it got its strength 'cause I remember the air conditioner leaking on top of it once while playing some Youtube videos and it didn't care. I turned it off for a while anyway, cleaned it, mopped the floor, wiped the desk, and took a bath.

While showering, I remembered that medical exam I was supposed to get last Saturday which I forgot about because I was so excited that the gym finally opened (secretly). I went there Saturday morning and fell asleep as soon as I got home. I was sore for days. It's been over a month since I last went to the gym. I called the clinic about the medical exam, they said I should be more specific, asked the HR again, and now waiting for the response.

I started looking into the issue and oh boy, what seemed to be one missed scenario requires a lot of changes. I remember now why I said I'll get back to it later. I had to review some legacy code that uses SOAP and some other old services. I think the external service doesn't support that one scenario so I have to figure out a way around it.

Does the person who reported it need it now? Does he need it NOW? Now I'm stress-eating a pork cutlet curry donburi (a shit ton of rice and sauce) when I should be doing low carb since too much carbs mess up my mood and triggers my allergies more often. Yes, I have tested it. Ah, who gives a fuck? Do you realize how fragile my routine and mental stability is? Now you do. Jenga!

I have so many things planned but now I'll probably cool myself down for the rest of the afternoon, drink some coffee, take a nap, and wake up in the evening to fix this shit. Hopefully, I get to submit the MR tomorrow morning.

As my sacrificial lamb, Jilano, once said after I sent this meme, "Well well well... If it isn't the consequences of my actions."

My code review nightmare part 2

Team responsible for code 'quality' dictated in their 18+ page coding standard document that all the references in the 'using' block be sorted alphabetically. Easy enough in Visual Studio with the right-click -> 'Remove and Sort Usings', so I thought.

Called into a conference room with other devs and the area manager (because 'Toby' needed an audience) focusing on my lack of code quality and not adhering to the coding standard.

The numerous files in question were unit tests files

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
<the rest of the usings>

T: "As you can see, none of these files' usings are in alphabetical order"
Me: "Um, I think they are. M comes before S"
T: "The standards clearly dictate system level references are to be sorted first."
Mgr: "Yes, why didn't you sort before checking this code in? T couldn't have made the standards any easier to follow. All you had to do is right-click and sort."
Me: "I did. M comes before S."
T: "No You Didn't! That is not a system reference!"
Me: "I disagree. MSTest references are considered a system level reference, but whatever, I'll move that one line if it upsets you that much."
Mgr: "OK smartass, that's enough disrespect. Just follow the fucking standard."
T: "And learn to sort. It's easy. You should have learned that in college"
<Mgr and T have a laugh>
Me: "Are all your unit tests up to standard? I mean, are the usings sorted correctly?"
T:"Um..well..of course they are!"
Me: "Lets take a look."

I had no idea, a sorted usings seems like a detail no one cares about that much and something people do when bored. I navigate to project I knew T was working on and found nearly all the file's usings weren't sorted. I pick on one..

using NUnit;
using Microsoft.Something.Other;
using System;
<the rest of the usings>

Me: "These aren't sorted..."
T: "Uh..um...hey...this file is sorted. N comes before M!"
Me: "Say that again. A little louder please."
Mgr: "NUnit is a system level nuget package. It's fine. We're not wasting time fixing some bug in how Visual Studio sorts"
Me: "Bug? What?..wait...and having me update 10 or so files isn't a waste of time?"
Mgr: "No! Coding standards are never a waste of time! We're done here. This meeting is to review your code and not T's. Fix your bugs and re-submit the code for review..today!"

Dev: Your PR only addresses a quarter of the ticket

Dev2: *limps a commit so that now 1/2 of the ticket is addressed and creates a new PR for a separate ticket*

Dev: Your original PR only addresses half of the ticket

Dev2: *limps a commit so that now 3/4 of the ticket is addressed and creates a new PR for ANOTHER new ticket*

Dev: Your original PR only addresses 3/4 of the ticket

Dev2: *limps a commit so that now all of the ticket is addressed but two new bugs are introduced and creates a new PR for ANOTHER new ticket*

Dev: Your original PR introduces 2 new bugs

Dev2: *limps a commit addressing one of the two new bugs and creates a new PR for ANOTHER new ticket*

Dev: Your original PR still has one bu—

Manager: WOW GOOD JOB DEV2 THAT’S 5 PRs TODAY AMAZING! Dev you need to pickup the pace, you only have 2 PRs so far today. And get these PRs from Dev2 QA’d fast. He’s a rockstar!

Dev: …

*The 4 other PRs turned out to be equally dogshit*

Manager: Hey hurry up with QA, you’re holding Dev2 back!

Dev: …

Did an interview this morning. Candidate had JavaScript on their resume but was mostly backend. Called themselves "senior" after 3.5 years of doing CMS upgrades and no coding.

Since JavaScript was on the resume I asked "what is the difference between == and === in JavaScript?" candidate completely failed.

Please offshore devs, don't put tech on your resume if you can't answer the most basic of questions. Don't call yourself senior when you've never even coded anything from scratch yourself.

Til that Linus Torvalds is one of us. When he made his initial commit of Git's code on April 7th 2005, he added a file called README. The first paragraph is fucking awesome...Read on..
(Note for the uninitiated: He created the git)

GIT - the stupid content tracker

"git" can mean anything, depending on your mood.

- random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not actually used by any common UNIX command. The fact that it is a mispronunciation of "get" may or may not be relevant.
- stupid. contemptible and despicable. simple. Take your pick from the dictionary of slang.
- "global information tracker": you're in a good mood, and it actually works for you. Angels sing, and a light suddenly fills the room.
- "goddamn idiotic truckload of sh*t": when it breaks

This is a stupid (but extremely fast) directory content manager. It doesn't do a whole lot, but what it _does_ do is track directory contents efficiently.