Details
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AboutI drink coffee, I hate people and I know things. PHP web dev by day, F# superhero by night.
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SkillsPHP, F#, Rust, Haskell, C#, Vue, TypeScript, AWS, SQL, C, Python et fucking cetera…
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Location83.666667, -29.833333
Joined devRant on 11/19/2019
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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…7 -
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?14 -
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…4
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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…1
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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… -
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.3 -
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.3 -
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…5 -
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…2
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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.9 -
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!6 -
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?11 -
Don’t know if I should be worried that I received an invite to a 1-on-1 meeting with the company CEO…16
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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.5 -
Chasing fucking unicorns…
I want an F# job where I don’t have to deal with the M$ bs beyond dotnet.. no fucking M$ servers, no Win workstations, none of that bs that makes work uncomfortable.
Guess that ain’t happening.
Looks like I’m going to be stuck writing PHP for the dough indefinitely, and be content in playing around with greatness on my own time.8 -
I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.
Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…
Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.
Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…
The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).
Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?1 -
Hot damn I’m stressed this morning. Been a while…
Just two weeks to get through and I should be able to breath a little more freely. I sure hope so at least.
I’m working on finishing my thesis, haven’t progressed with the IaC project as good as I’d have liked to, it’s the time of the year when the increasing darkness really starts to get on you, and on top of that the kitten’s sick.
I know many of you even might have it worse. But I tend to buckle when I face adversities - cause I’m weak like that. At the moment I’m most concerned that the pressure I put on myself is bad nuff for me to bail on my thesis - when I’m two weeks from being done, tops. I don’t think I was fine anymore when the cat got sick, but that’s been a tipping point for the whole shebang to get to my head…3 -
When TypeScript gets on your nerves so badly you find yourself considering switching to Python…
… is something I never thought would actually happen.3 -
I tried setting up an F* development environment on a Mac…
Yeah, that’s the rant. You can probably guess how it went…8 -
Here’s my step-by-step guide for the idiot:
1) take <cutting-egde tech> (Tech)
2) read documentation for Tech
3) figure out what you want to do with Tech
4) if you are being ambitious, simplify the idea appropriately
5) Go do the thing with the Tech
6 When you fail at something, RTFM
7) Rinse and repeat2 -
Sometimes I do wonder why can’t I just be content at getting best I can get at what I’m already good at - and what brings in the €€€? Why do I go ”oooh look shiny intetesting language, let’s try do shit with it” or ”hey, let’s try this thing called kernel dev/pld/program verification which are all so far outside my core expertise they might as well be in a different universe!”
Dude I mean writing a kernel in V and doing proof oriented programming in F* are fun and all, but what good’s that gonna do me when I’m in all likelihood still maintaining legacy web apps in PHP ten to twenty years from now?
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m torn inside with my current workplace offering me everything I value and stuff that’s rare to find - but at the same time I’d love to be challenged more and don’t really have enough of those opportunities in my current environment. Or some shit like that.
Well fuck that, back to writing my own embedded DSL into F* in F#….1 -
Should I infastructure as code or should I not? The god damn difficulty of approaching a cloud infra modernization project… so much to potentially do, don’t even know where to start and what is or isn’t relevant in the end… gaah11
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Been a few weeks now back at the office after a good four weeks off… still no work to do….
”Guess I’ll write a compiler in C then, a good chance to brush up on it.”
”… hmm, haven’t touched any simple html in ages, maybe I try and do this frontend as vanilla as possible”
”What if I tried remaking this backend with Suave? Haven’t written much F# in a while, here’s a chance to brush up on mah mad skillzors”
Never a dull moment, and while I’m cranking out code like a maniac, I feel very, very unproductive due to no actual work getting done. -
I started to teach my partner some programming basics (web, just html and some css for starters), since they asked me to. So far we haven’t killed each others, so it’s going much better than expected.
Also, it seems to be a very common misconception that one needs to be a special breed of person to be able to understand and write some code.10 -
It never ends…
It just sits there, staring at you, begging to be fixed, and when you try and get to it, it bites your hand ferociously, forcing you to retreat. And this same circle goes on, and on, and on…1