Me: Optimize a sort & match method in backend because users complain it's a bit slow.

Coworker: These algorithms are both O(n), so they're identical *closes PR*

Me: *start zoom call* "Heeeeeeeeeey Iiiiiiiiiii wouuuuuuuld liiiiiiiiike toooooo diiiiiisscuuuuus thaaaaaaaat puuuuuuulllll reeeeeequuuueeest yooooouuuuu cloooooossseeeed"

Coworker: "wtf are you doing, why are you talking so slow"

Me: "No matter whether I talk fast or slow, the information still reaches you in O(n) time, so why are you complaining"

I fucking hate it when people misunderstand the purpose of (or abuse) big O notation. It's an estimate of how an algorithm SCALES once the set increases in size, in which case you leave out both less significant terms and constant factors.

But those terms and factors are important when you're talking about the DIRECT PERFORMANCE of the algorithm on fixed-size sets, instead of SCALING to larger sets.

1n and 10n are both O(n), but 10x performance on a job that used to take 10 minutes is still significant.

HR sent around updated contracts asking everyone to sign them since the company changed its name, fair enough.

In the contract it stated "Your normal place of work will be X" - only X was many miles away, and I'd never worked there, never planned too. Assumed it was a mistake, sent it back. HR refused to change it, stating that the "normal place of work does not need to be the place where you normally work."

A lot of back and forth entailed, I refused to sign, I was reprimanded for not doing so, I was asked what my problem was as it made no material difference, and then I eventually replied with:

"Angela, I'm refusing to sign this as it's factually incorrect. No further explanation is required. I'll maybe consider signing this if you sign a piece of paper declaring you believe the moon is made of cheese, and you're the cow the milk came from to make it."

A very strongly worded email came back about how this was going on my record, I needed to offer a formal apology, etc. - all cc'd to my manager. I replied back, again copying my manager in, stating that this was ok, as I couldn't remain at a company who forced employees to sign dodgy contracts anyway.

Problem was (for them), I was a *massive* single point of failure for them at this point owing to some others leaving with no handover - hence I knew I wasn't going to be the casualty here. My manager flipped the lid at HR, got the CEO involved on threat of *him* leaving, and the whole thing massively blew up. Happy ending in that the HR person in question was fired, everyone else's contracts also had to be redone (I assumed everyone else just signed without looking which is worrying), and I actually got a pay rise out of it when higher ups realised the massive single point of failure I was.

But damn, I would've walked over crap like that. Walked pretty soon after anyway!

A while back, I had a lot of telemarketers were calling me daily, and I mean A LOT of them.

I got so frustrated with he calls that I decided I had to figure out a better way to handle those calls.

At the time, I was working with a PBX software called Asterisk, which is used to handle hardware interfaces and network applications for phone calls.

I needed a suitable side project and there was a version of Asterisk designed for Raspberry Pi, so I made a fun little answering service for myself.

Whenever a telemarketer called, I asked them to call back later, but to "my personal number", and gave them the number to my phone robot. (which had a pre-paid SIM card in a GSM dongle mounted)

When it received a call, it would play a pre-recorded phrase, wait for 1000 ms of silence and then play the next phrase.
After all 16 phrases had been played, it would start from phrase 7 again and repeat until the caller gave up.

I had this set up running for a while, and then added another robot for english speaking callers.

The calls stopped after a few months.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

Dear Microsoft,

Thanks for not completely fucking up Github. At least you didn't integrate Office365, allow only Azure deployments, or force downloading repos through OneDrive or something.

But like most developers, I don't deal well with changes to familiar interfaces.

So please.... STOP FUCKING TWEAKING THE BUTTON PLACEMENTS AND TEXTS ALL OVER THE WEBSITE.

(or at least send me a bottle of cognac and a box of chocolates before every UI experiment, so I can deal with it emotionally. I'm a very sensitive boy, you know).

I'd like to extend my heartfelt fuck-you to the following persons:

- The recruiter who told me that at my age I wouldn't find a job anymore: FUCK YOU, I'll send you my 55 birthday's cake candles, you can put all of them in your ass, with light on.

- The Project Manager that after 5 rounds of interviews and technical tests told me I didn't have enough experience for his project: be fucked in an Agile way by all member of your team, standing up, every morning for 15 minutes, and every 2 weeks by all stakeholders.

- The unemployment officer who advised me to take low level jobs, cut my expenses and salary expectations: you can cut your cock and suck it, so you'll stop telling bullshit to people

- The moron that gave me a monster technical assignment on Big Data, which I delivered, and didn't gave me any feedback: shove all your BIG DATA in your ass and open it to external integrations

- the architect who told me I should open my horizons, because I didn't like React: put a reactive mix in your ass and close it, so your shit will explode in your mouth

- the countless recruiter who used my cv to increase their db, offering fake jobs: print all your db on paper and stuff your ass with that, you'll see how big you will be

To all of them, really really fuck you.

When I was in 7th grade, my neighbor (a DoD programmer) challenged me to write a sorting algorithm for a hypothetical super limited environment (he said a satellite). It didn’t have any built-in sorting methods, had very limited memory, slow processor, etc. so I needed to be clever about it.

It took me a few nights before i found a solution he liked. The method I came up with counted the number of occurrences of each number in the array and put them in the appropriate spots in a new array. This way it only required O(2n) running time and 2n memory.

I just learned today that this is called the “counting sort” 😄

I’m proud of little 11 year old me.

IT Manager: What kind if attachment did you send me in that email?

Me: A .zip?

IT Manager: ...?

Me: A zip file? Zipped Folder?

IT Manger: ...?

Me: Umm... the data file you needed has to be sent in a zip folder because 6 different file types combine to make it? Just download the .zip and extract?

IT Manager: I don't know how to extract the files?

Me: ...

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?

I was hired as Project Manager.

After few days, I discovered that:
- I didn't have a team
- I was also the main and only developer
- all the projects I was assigned to were late
- I was also the account manager and I had to explain the delay to the customers.

And no, the salary didn't make up for the daily loss of reputation.

I lasted more than I thought, when I discovered that customers were not interested in delivery either, as it was a kind of money laundering scheme

I’m going to fucking kill my boss.

He’s known about how I’ve been writing this fucking ticket (screwdriver followup) for four fucking weeks, and on the last fucking day (yesterday) he tells me it’s not the correct fucking architecture and to rewrite basically all of it using <unknown bullshit> instead, and that i must have it done by today — by this fucking morning — so it can make the release.

WHY THE FUCK DIDN’T YOU TELL ME ABOUT THIS AT ANY POINT IN THE LAST FUCKING MONTH WHILE YOU WERE BUSY NITPICKING MY FUCKING CODE YOU FUCKING CUNT?!

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.

!rant, a success story.

I made a tool for a live streamer I like, for free. Something to find highlights in a VOD based on the chatlog.

It took me around 15h to make. It is a very simple electron app, the "valuable" code is ~70 lines.
I wasn't sure he would even bother to try it.

Anyways, I send it to him. 10 minutes later, the guy tells me that "this is amazing! You just saved me hours of derushing my streams ❤️"

That's great already, but it does not end there. A few minutes later he asks me "I know other streamers that would love it, can I share? And can I add you in our private discord?"

I have now a direct access to some of the best youtubers/streamers in my country 🤩.

I got fired.

Worst job I ever had, they extended my probation period, called me "over maintenance", said my work was good but not good enough for the effort, If I take a lot of care doing my work then it's "over preparation", if not good enough then it's "not detailed enough", I don't ask enough questions? I must be unmotivated, I ask too many? I take up too much of other people's time.

Fuck them all. I hope they get a taste of their own medicine.

Sometime it feels like I'm surrounded with idiots.

Got a Ticket:

Support: Please delete installation ABC from Server D.

Me: Checks everything. Installation is on Server E. Asks if this is correct?

Support: Just follow the instructions!

Me: Okey dokey. If you want me to be a hammer the installation is a nail... Drop database, Remove all files. nuke K8s resources

Support: Why did you delete the installation ABC? You should delete XYZ!

Me: Cause the ticket told to delete ABC on Server D and YOU told me to follow your instructions!

Support: Yeah but we just reused an old ticket. We wanted XYZ deleted!

It's not a big deal I can restore the shit but I hate it if a day starts with this kind of shit!

So this chick has been super nice to me for the past few months, and has been trying to push me towards a role in security. She said nothing but wonderful things about it. It’s easy, it’s not much work, it’s relaxing, etc.

I eventually decided I’m burned out enough that something, anything different would be good, and went for it. I’m now officially doing both dev and security. The day I started, she announced that she was leaving the security team and wouldn’t join any other calls. Just flat-out left.

She trained me on doing a security review of this release, which basically amounted to a zoom call where I did all of the work and she directed me on what to do next, ignored everything I said, and treated me like an idiot. It’s apparently an easy release. The work itself? Not difficult, but it’s very involved, very time consuming, and requires a lot of paper trail — copying the same crap to three different places, tagging lots of people, copying their responses and pasting them elsewhere, filing tickets, linking tickets, copying info back and forth to slack, signing off on things, tagging tickets in a specific way, writing up security notes in a very specific format etc. etc. etc. It’s apparently usually very hectic with lots of last-minute changes, devs who simply ignore security requests, etc.

I asked her at the end for a quick writeup because I’m not going to remember everything and we didn’t cover everything that might happen.

Her response: Just remember what you did here, and do it again!

I asked again for her to write up some notes. She said “I would recommend.. you watch the new release’s channel starting Thursday, and then review what we did here, and just do all that again. Oh, and if you have any questions, talk to <security boss> so you get in the habit of asking him instead of me. Okay, bye!”

Fucking what.
No handoff doc?
Not willing to answer questions after a day and a half of training?

A recap
• She was friendly.
• She pushed me towards security.
• She said the security role was easy and laid-back.
• I eventually accepted.
• She quit the same day.
• The “easy release” took a day and a half of work with her watching, and it has a two-day deadline.
• She treated (and still treats) me like a burden and ignores everything I said or asked.
• The work is anything but laid-back.
• She refuses to spend any extra time on this or write up any notes.
• She refuses to answer any further questions because (quote) “I should get in the habit of asking <security boss> instead of her”

So she smiled, lied, and stabbed me in the back. Now she’s treating me like an annoyance she just wants to go away.

I get that she’s burned out from this, but still, what a fucking bitch. I almost can’t believe she’s acting this way, but I’ve grown to expect it from everyone.

But hey, at least I’m doing something different now, which is what I wanted. The speed at which she showed her true colors, though, holy shit.

“I’m more of a personal motivator than anything,” she says, “and I’m first and foremost a supporter of women developers!” Exactly wrong, every single word of it.

God I hate people like this.

So I have a teacher that when he use "C++" it is basically C with a .cpp file-extension and -O0 compiler flag.

Last assignment was to implement some arbitrary lengthy calculation with a tight requirement of max 1 second runtime, to force us to basically handroll C code without using std and any form of abstraction. But because the language didn’t freeze in time 1998, there is a little keyword named "constexpr" that folded all my classes, arrays, iterators, virtual methods, std::algorithms etc, into a single return statement. Thus making my code the fastest submitted.

Lesson of the story, use the language to the fullest and always turn on the damn optimizer

Ok now I’m done 😚

I ended up quitting my first job for many reasons, but this talk still haunts me:

"our workers need to input this data and they tab a lot because [...]"

Me: "ok... Where do they get the data from?

"A standard model compiled via web, sent via mail and then printed for them."

Me: "..."

Them: "..."

Me: "how about we make the import automatic?"

Them: "but then what will our workers do?"

To this day I am still impacted by this dialog... Not much for the stupidity from a business logic point of view (there are many bad companies, and this is not the only one I met in my career), but rather for the implications our job has and for the fact bs jobs are a thing because we are SO used to the capitalism that the bad guys are the ones removing boring tasks, rather than the shitty system which forces you to do a repetitive and automatable task and which reduces you to a shell doing a job a machine could do... And thanks for the wasted paper/ink, global warming ain't gonna get worse on its own!

Things I like about WFH
-save petrol and mileage
-work in underwear
-big TV during lunch
-time saved by no commute
-lie down during meetings

Things I dislike
-feel like my room has been invaded by work/miss the physical separation of work and home
-distractions and temptations
-they moved the stand up to ealier because of WFH
-Everything has to be a meeting. No just popping by someone's desk with a quick question

Sometimes I miss physically seeing my colleagues/getting out of the house but not often

I have a college that never seems to answer anything fully, just the bare minimum to make it seem like he did.

Regular conversations with him goes like this:

Me: “hey, I have a problem with this feature you added, I’m getting an error *insert error*”
Him: “yeah theres a script for that...”

Me: *wait for the script he mentioned*

Me: “whats the script?”
Him: “it’s FixIssues.sh”

Me: *looks for the script in the project*

Me: “hey, I can’t find it, where is it?”
Him: “here it is” *pastes a script into chat*
Me: “Oh, where can i find that in the project?”
Him: “you can’t”
Me: “???”
Him: “I have it in my OneDrive”

WHY CAN’T YOU JUST SAY THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE? Why this song and dance every time I ask something? This conversation could have been over in 1 minute but instead we both have to waste 15 minutes of our time to get this far.

Eh ehe hehe he eh ehehe

On top of burnout, codebase issues, spec issues, burnout, the product butt that keeps on crapping, burnout, burnout, loathing for my employer... My local Apple SSL cert expired. I can’t finish this and push it anywhere for testing. I can’t even run my own specs anymore. And I don’t have permissions to make a new one. I can’t do anything at all.

Ehe he hehe

Deadline is in two days, and I’m just sitting here laughing quietly to myself. I might finally be going crazy

I found a loose bit of tangle, started to pull, and the world decided it was time to fall apart. Reality said it’s time to go. And I wasn’t even a good screwdriver dev. Byeee ~