No wonder it’s hard to hire devs with even a basic level of competency or some kind of promise that them might be able to learn shit given time, opportunity and guidance. The sheer amount of idiocy and stupidity and straight up incompetent cringe I witness on every platform giving us devs a voice (yes, including here) is mindboggling…

Work day 3 of 2023… gawrram I’m bored. Another day of IaC. Unfortunately the issues I’ve dealt with today are sequential from the QA point of view. And our QA is slow us fuck today. So a lot of waiting around for me today. I’m one fucking issue away from the Great Infrastructure Update. So close, yet so far, knowing how slow our QA process is…

So here I’m sitting around in my office away from office pondering what the hell I should do with all this time…

Working day 2 of 2023… (yes, I got the year right this time)

Another day of CDK, and cursing how far it can at points lack behind in features. It’s only annoying when you’d actually want to use one of those new features. 4 issues resolved today, only 3 (known issues) on my backlog before this one’s done.

Oh, and TIL that one of my first tasks in my new role (that I can transfer to once I’m done with this project) is to write some IaC. Happy days. It’s pretty much all I’ve done for gawd knows how long. So good nothing ever changes.

SQL was never meant to be used in web applications. It is inherently insecure in its c&c schema. Can we please fucking stop using databases that are not designed for the web in the web? Please?

(I know, I know, we’re stuck with what we have. But for fok’s sake, I want to strangle that muthafucka who thought it’s a good idea…)

I am going to start a random stuff from dev life diary just for your annoyance… cause I’m bored (and kind of want to see how long I can be bothered to keep shit like this going)

So, work day 1 for 2022. Wrote TS and YAML. Yay, IaC is fun. Also, no one has bothered me with dms or calls or any such shite today, which is the way I like it. Leave me be, mofos!

Should still bother to prepare all the shit for tomorrow’s PoC spec planning workshop… what a chore. Couldn’t be bothered, I’d much rather someone else did the specs and I could skip to design and implementation. But I guess this is yet another context where I have to do it all myself. Woo hoo…

Simple. Get that fucking project I’ve been on and off working on (mostly) by myself for the last year and a half or so into production so that I can begin the transition to my new role… where I get to be a major pain in the arse for all our devs with my security pitchfork. Mwahaha!

I don’t really know how people make technology decisions… there are just so many factors to consider. And there’s some sort of drawbacks to every approach.

Completely forgot to update what was going on with my potential role shift. Long story short, it was approved by the damagement. That’s nice.

I only have to get to a major milestone in my current giant of an IaC project and transfer enough knowledge to leave it in my current team mates’ hands. Looks like we’ll be there pretty much next week and I can switch at the start of 2023. Life’s good.

I’m worried my manager denies me my role shift because I’m supposedly an invaluable asset to our small team, even though the request has been approved by the higher ups already. I would totally understand, tbh, but it’d suck nonetheless.

I don’t consider myself ambitious, but I’d like to move forward, not just run in place.

What is free time?

https://devrant.com/rants/5707287/...

At least it seems I might be pivoting when it comes to my job description, which should mean (on top of a pay hike) a better defined workload, even though the amount of it might not lessen (working with all of the company’s products vs. just one).
We’ll see.

So on top of having way too many hats at work and starting my master’s studies in a few weeks, I just had an idea for a game that’s too good to not start working on. I am drowning myself in shit to do. Again.

I used to work in the culture and entertainment field. Some work days during festivals and tours were long. It wasn’t uncommon for me to work 24h+ straight, but I think the longest uninterrupted work session was during the first iteration of a big music festival, where I ended up doing a 53h (to my recollection) day, then taking a 3h nap, and continuing for another several hours. Dev work is so much easier comparatively in that regard - and the money’s better.

Still on the fence: to jump to the dark side and become a consultant - or stay where I’m at. There be cookies on both sides. And now there be offers aplenty as well…

To stay and do DevSecOps and refactoring (and hopefully in the future rearchitecting) in an environment I’m very damn comfortable in or jump into the unknown (tho into any of the few tech companies I have a positive image of) to become a cloud consultant? Or to work with F#? Or to the EV industry? So many options…

I’m spoiled with choices and I don’t like that.

Pro tip: don’t accept a meeting with a potential employer for the beginning of your holidays (I know, ’muricans, you don’t get this concept where basically everyone taked paid vacation for several weeks during summer) so that you’ll end up thinking about whether to jump ship or not for most of your holidays, effectively ruining your time to potentially relax for you.

Just don’t do it.

I kind of miss abbie boi doxxing randos, avoiding all responsibility, arguing against all reason and just generally making no sense… that was fun.

Now we only have Kaine’s avatar making absolutely no sense at all. So boring…

So I got accepted into a Master’s programme for CS - which is kinda cool but hardly unexpected. Guess I should feel elated about it, but honestly, I don’t know how I feel about it. Really it only adds additional complexity into the next few years of my life: I feel a little gutted that I have to switch over to my plan B regarding the sporting side of my life (there’s no way I can work full-time, study AND train for IM simultaneously - there’s just not enough hours in a day…), but that’s okay. At least I had a plan B knowing I might get accepted to these studies now.

What it really complicates is decisionmaking regarding this: https://devrant.com/rants/5571843/...

At my current workplace, I have officially 2hrs each week + an additional full work day a month to use for studying during work hours (in reality I tend to use more than that because I can, whenever there are no pressing matters need doing), and my gut is saying that’s unlikely to be possible in a consultancy position in a startup. Maybe it is, I don’t know. Need to ask.

In life, very few things are ever straightforward, aren’t they? But hey, at least I get to do my Master’s and I get to do it in a quality university!

Suddenly, I find myself in a crossroad situation. I have been offered a position which would align perfectly with my career path aspirations (cloud solutions architect) with double the pay to my current salary. If only those were the only variables in this equation, taking the offer would be a no-brainer. Alas, it is never that simple (unless all you care about are pay and career path, of course)…

So, let’s break it down to pros and cons of jumping ship, shall we?

Pros:
- double pay compared to current salary
- aligns with my career aspiration
- part of a team of cloud solutions architects (mentorship opportunities)
- varying projects (position is at a consultancy firm)
- shares of the company come with the position ($$$ if it grows)
- possibility to influence strategic decisions
- no more 2h+ commutes

Cons:
- it’s a consultancy startup (emphasis on both consultancy and startup)
- 100% wfh
- would mean losing my current team where we are well and truly glued together and have such great vibes (and I value this, very very highly - this really is the main con)
- would mean losing my current work environment, where we have a gym and sauna at the office etc all kinds of stuff that support my athletic lifestyle
- would mean I don’t have as many opportunities to visit my parents anymore (since they live close to my current office but not close to me)
- at my current position I have super interesting projects both ongoing and in the horizon for a long time to come
- would mean eating my words (see previous point, and the fact I’ve said to my TM ”I can see myself staying as long as this job offers me opportunities to keep learning skills that are meaningful to me”), and I value my integrity
- would mean leaving my colleagues in quite a hairy spot, effectively betraying them in my mind (when our lead dev jumped ship a few years ago, he left us in quite a limbo and hands full of shit we didn’t know what to do about… I don’t wish that situation for anyone)

So, to sum it up, my reasons to stay are more those of moral integrity and convenience, well as the will to see the wheels I got rolling to the end, whereas my reasons to go are more personal finances and career oriented. A difficult decision. What to do?

People here have so weird problems… and because of that I’m nowadays really scared of changing jobs. Like I know I might easily double my paycheck by just taking any of the offers thrown at me, but that ain’t worth some of the shit I hear you peeps endure…

I just found the current main project of the people who originally wrote the codebase I’m mainly working with. After all these years they still write incoherent spaghetti mess. I need to make a throwaway GH account just to tell them people like them are the reason people hate PHP…

On the topic of having to make decisions as a dev that shouldn’t be made (solely, at least) by devs…

There’s a lot to like in my current work environment: I enjoy being around my colleagues, I get to do a variety of tasks, and many of them interesting to me and/or great learning opportunities, the pay doesn’t suck and so on… there’s also not much pressure put on the dev team from other parts of the organisation. The flipside of the coin is that nobody who should express some kind of vision as to how we should develop the product further does so.

Me and my fellow devs in the team are so frustrated about it. It feels like we’re just floating around, doing absolutely nothing meaningful. It’s as if the business people just don’t care. And we are the ones ending up deciding what features to develop and what the specs are for those etc. and I really don’t think we should be the ones doing that.

One would think that’s a great opportunity to work on refactoring, infrastructure, security and process improvements and so on - but somehow we get bothered just enough by mundane issues we can’t get to work on those effectively. Also, many of the things we’d want to do would need sign-off from the management, but they are not responsive really. Just not there. Except for our TM, but they don’t have the power neccessary… at least they are trying tho…

I’m starting to like snek…

Not really trying to, but probably should try to fix this bad, bad habit…

I keep wanting to fix and improve everything - and I keep taking notes, writing action plans et fucking cetera to the point the amount of work that should be done and I want to do is driving me insane. And they should all get done now!

In short, I should really either learn to focus on just one thing at a time for a meaningful period - or just cease to give a fuck. Either could work.

https://devrant.com/rants/5124329/...

Half a year later, absolutely NOTHING has changed. Except I have more work on my plate in addition to that big project and those integrations and shit… I’m fucked. So badly need some time off, but ain’t got time for that.

There are so many weird hacks in the quite legacy app I work with I could write a book about all them hacks…

But I must admit, the worst of them all is internal time. Yes, so some blockhead thought it’s a good idea to represent time in a manner completely removed from Datetime objects or timestamps or even string representations. Instead we deal with them as intervals represented by integers - and because this is not fucked up enough by itself, the internal time doesn’t start at midnight, yet the integer representations do. It’s a bloody mess. No wonder most of the bugs we face have to do with dates and time…

I’ve somehow ended up in a situation where I have a big project to work on - alone, since I’m the only dev in the whole company with any expertise whatsoever in that area… which is exhausting enough by itself, since I have nowhere to turn to when I struggle with it, no one to rubber duck with and share the workload with, no one to review my code. On top of that, I’ve somehow become thee go to dev resource when it comes to this integration, that client’s custom shit and so on. I’ve been doing this big damn project since late August, and I keep getting pulled off it for weeks at a time. I think I haven’t had more than a day or two in a row to concentrate on it for at least 3 months… and my manager keeps asking me when it’ll be done. What I’d give for a few more devs to share the workload with…

That feeling when you’ve got a reputation of preciseness etc, and the code you just submitted for review has so many silly little mistakes you just want to do that ostrich thing. Gosh, how can I suddenly suck at my job this bad?

Okay, the changes affect EVERYTHING in our codebase (a major change in core business logic), and there is no way I could’ve tested every possible case by myself without a decent coverage of automated tests - which we obviously don’t have. So yet another argument for it (damn management, won’t you listen?!)… but still, some of the mistakes found during code review make me seem like a complete idiot.

An unfriendly reminder: if you don’t know how to use a fucking search engine to at least try and find solutions to your problems, get your sorry ass the fuck out of here!

I reiterate: if you can’t utilise a search engine any better than the average gorilla, you’re an asswipe with no fucking right to even consider getting within miles of devs, you fucktard!

Ok so, another post got me thinking…

Every browser I’ve tried sucks one way or another. Chrome, Firefox, Vivaldi etc…

Safari on my work Mac is so far the least annoying one, although it seems to have an issue with Google’s services…

On my personal computer (Linux) I use mainly Vivaldi, tho I have Firefox installed as well since apparently Vivaldi doesn’t quite support everything on the interwebs…

So, fellow ranters, what are your favoured browsers (all platforms go!) and most importantly, why?

Don’t know if I should be worried that I received an invite to a 1-on-1 meeting with the company CEO…

Every time I feel like I suck at my job, I open dR and read a few rants and comments. Suddenly I don’t feel so dumb anymore.

Every time I feel my job or workplace sucks, I open dR and read a few rants and comments. Suddenly I don’t feel like my job isn’t that bad anymore.