Bloody superglue. Every time I think I'm remotely skilled enouh to make a "quick repair" using the stuff, it always goes beyond horribly wrong and ends up with blobs of superglue all over the desk, one hand stuck to the thing I'm meant to be repairing, and the other stuck to some random nearby object. Dahh. Seems so simple.

I'm sure there's a dev analogy there with your least favourite language too.

Once had a manager who would refuse to review anything on the basis he "didn't have enough time". Not just code reviews, but also customer comms, support messages, documentation etc. - anything that it's good to get more than 1 set of eyes on. This was a small startup so me working pretty much solo - it wasn't like there was anyone else able to review anything like this.

Fair enough, you might say. He trusts me. Just put it out there.

...but then *as soon as* it was published / sent / committed / whatever, he'd then magically find 5 minutes to glance through it and point out how rubbish / unhelpful / ridiculous the work was, and how it should have never gone out in the first place, and why didn't I read through it before sending as I'd clearly realise how stupid this was.

After a few rounds of this I actually flipped out on him in the office, called him out on his BS and told him to think for 2 seconds about how ridiculous this situation was. In fairness to the guy he did back down, take note and it didn't happen again, but damn, those times were some of the most frustrating of my career to date.

If I interview one more guy who thinks dependency injection is wholly "those spring annotations" and nothing else, I think I might scream.

What is it with devs who try to bloody "cost optimise" everything to within an inch of its life when there's no reason to do so?! This ain't your personal pocket money project here. This is a real commercial app with real consequences.

Seriously, saving £100 a month might seem like a lot to you, but this is a multi million pound project we're talking about. That's bloody nothing, and no-one will care. If a Fargate spot instance restarts at the wrong time and causes downtime though, or if we need logs going back a week, and don't have them because the log retention period is a few days, then everyone will be royally pissed. All because you thought "it should be ok", or it "seemed like the right thing to do". Sod off.

Next major version of spring will require Java 17.

Bloody finally. Hope this gives corporations the kick up the behind they need to move beyond 8.

How is there no open, accepted, widely used standard to store & tag things like old family photo albums, diaries, books, etc.? Surely I can't be the only one who wants to digitise all this stuff to preserve it many years from now in case the drunk Uncle pisses on it, or Grandma's dodgy electrics burn the house down and it's all lost permanently. Or perhaps I am; it does seem that most other people doing genealogy work have the technical competence of a lemon.

Like, I get it, there's *some* online solutions for this stuff (not many and they tend to cost a fortune), but if I want to store it locally or in a private git repo or whatever... well, no-one seems to do it. I want to be able to interlink individual photos with their contextual pages in albums, store metadata about them, store audio recordings of older relatives with transcripts linked, etc. - and it just doesn't seem to be a done thing.

Ah well. Perhaps I'll do it all anyway as some kind of side project, then all being well my great great grandchildren will be immensely thankful if family history stuff ever becomes popular again.

Somehow being able to make perfect sense out of the meaningless and vague requirements pushed down from upper management.

Gotta love it when you turn down a recruiter and they ask you if you know any friends who might be interested.

"Potentially, what's my commission if I do your job for you?!"

🤨

Dealing with a Salesforce (what else,heh) bug that caused batch payment requests to be fired off at seemingly random intervals. Pretty big consequences to that one.

Of course, the problem is that no-one assumes it's a Salesforce bug, and you have to spend an eternity proving that it's not your fault...

Everyone talks about crappy categories of user on Stackoverflow - help vampires, rep whores, etc. - but the category of "people who don't care about the stupid mind games, politics or internet points and just want to help others" is so small people apparently don't even think it can exist.

I mean sheesh, I answer on there in my free time to just lend a hand to people, usually in a couple of niche tags that have very little info elsewhere, even for beginners. Of course there's questions that are beyond salvaging and just random homework dumps, but the majority are from genuinely confused users who simply don't know the correct terms to search for.

A question is not inherently evil just because its asker has misunderstood a key concept.

I'm not even asking you to help the poor sods, I'm just asking you to allow me to help without calling me a rep whore or a moron who'd be better talking to bots on reddit 🙄

I get it, Java is an old language that's verbose as the day is long. But damn, please don't make it *even more verbose* than it needs to be. We've got the tools now to make it at least somewhat tolerable.

I mean, come on, we've got lombok, we've got streams, and we've had Comparator.comparing since Java 8. That's the best part of a decade you've had the luxury of writing single line comparator implementations out the box, but noooo, certain people have to pretend they're stuck in the 90's by thinking these multiple if / else statements are somehow still the best way of doing things.

Dahhh. Skill up people. This is not an industry where you can just do everything how you did it 20 years ago and call it good.

Companies really need to re-evaluate what they ask as security questions.

If I know your name and your approximate date of birth (to the month) then, here in the UK at least, I have a very good chance of being able to find out your parents names, your mother's maiden name, your address, your parents address (i.e. probably where you grew up and what school you went to), your parents ages, when they got married, etc. - and all from publicly available info, not illegal crap you find on Tor or social media stalking.

This isn't hard to find if you know where to look - the problem is that people think that it's all private, and behave as such - and companies encourage it. The typical "internet safety courses" don't even touch on it, and even more tech savvy people I know often don't have a clue this is possible.

cat log | grep blah

Ted, Akka is a damn Scala library. Yeah yeah, I know you can fit it into your Java project if you really want to, but damn, you just end up with ugly Java syntax that tries and fails to be Scala. Just bloody well use Scala. Or use something more Java-esque like reactor if you *really* want to do async stuff and stay in Java land. But please, please don't use Akka in Java. The thing is a mess. I know it's asynchronous which in fairness does help in this application, but seriously just....

Wait... hang on... WHAT?! You're using the whole thing in an asynchronous reactive chain then just calling join() on everything?! What do you mean it's "mostly asynchronous but just blocks at the end?!?!" Do you like watching people suffer for no purpose, Ted? Do you?

Goldman Sachs analysts - hey, please could we stop working 95 hour weeks? It's really getting silly.

David Solomon - Hey, I'm really glad you brought this up! But screw you. Work harder.

...yeah. Even ignoring the morality of the situation, that was a commercially stupid move. I can't think of a single person that would now want to apply there, analyst or not. Can't help but feeling they've lost a lot of potentially great dev talent over the coming months & years.

Grumpy old git warning.

What's with this fad of calling everything a "hack"?! Not just in the dev world (though articles like "the 5 greatest Python hacks that will save you time!" grind my gears too.) But no, we've also got "gardening hacks", "life hacks", "recipe hacks"...

Dude, they're just "gardening tips". They're just "useful suggestions". Or in the case of "recipe hacks", THEY'RE JUST BLOODY RECIPES.

Eurgh.

Talk about scaremongering. This is the best thing to happen in the academic community in eons.

https://bbc.co.uk/news/...

On my annoying radar today - devs who learn one language and then *insist* on using it for everything, even when it makes absolutely zero sense.

"Ooh I'd like to do some microcontroller development. But I only know Java. How do you run Java on a microcontroller?"

"...You don't."

"...but I heard a talk where someone did it. Look, there's this microjava page. How do I use it?"

"It's an interesting technical demo, but that's it. Dude, just learn C. It's not hard, Java has C style syntax anyway and this way you can...."

"...but I only want to use modern programming languages. C is irrelevant these days, it's pointless me learning it."

"It's definitely still relevant if you want to program a microcontroller."

"...but I want to do that in Java."

🤦‍♂️

Can't stand it when devs who never bother to do anything / don't pull their weight etc. suddenly come out with:

"Ooh I'm really feeling the imposter syndrome right now, I feel like everyone around me is just leagues ahead of me and I shouldn't be here"

...then wait for everyone to tell them how amazing they are, how they're a critical part of the team etc.

No mate, imposter syndrome is a thing, but so is being a genuine waste of everyone's time. I'm not talking about having bad days, I'm talking about your work output being practically zilch for the past half a year or so because you're "not too familiar with the framework", then going after this pity party approach. As a senior dev, it's kinda insulting to all the great junior and mid level devs who do a better job while being paid considerably less.

Am I the only one happy that no-one can post images anymore? Kinda refreshing that all the crappy memes are gone 😂

PLEASE DON'T ENGAGE THE SPAMBOTS. Seriously, the number of obvious spam posts I see with (usually the same few) users underneath posting things like "No, fuck you and your sunglasses Kyle" or similar is 🤦‍♂️.

Guys, you're helping them. They feed off it, they note it as engagement, and they're more likely to continue posting. (Not just on devrant, but everywhere.) Just downvote / report as spam and move on.

Don't get stuck maintaining legacy stuff.

If you move to new, preferably greenfield dev every so often then you'll naturally keep with the times (at least if you're working in a vaguely decent team.) If you stick in one place too long and get stuck maintaining legacy crap, then that will be your focus, and that will be where your knowledge sticks.

You guys choose your specialities? I just find myself falling into them, and occasionally being interested in them. If the two line up, bingo.

Occasionally I get a reputation for being good at something I can't stand to work with though, which is never a particularly fun combination.

Every time I hear the word "trailblazing" I throw up a little. Even beats "synergy" as a useless, demonic corporate buzzword.

!Dev

Can't stand it when you excitedly mention the Mars rover (or anything space related) to someone and they say "Yeah but what's the point you could be feeding the poor or sorting out the environment with that money instead"

...yeah, you could. Or you could be doing that with money from the army instead. Or football. Or any other popular sport. Or yaknow, you could personally be doing that rather than spending all your salary on crappy clothes you're going to throw away in a few months anyway.

And that's not even mentioning the jobs it creates, the people it inspires to go into science + tech fields, the scientific advances it makes for humanity, etc. If you're that against scientific advancement then please, by all means surrender your possessions and just go live in a cave somewhere.

"I keep complaining to you guys every day about this bug and nothing happens!"

Firstly, it ain't a bug. Secondly, you're not complaining, you're whining. Thirdly, complaining is a bloody limited resource. If you do it once a year, everyone's going to sit up and take notice. If you do it daily, it's just "Duncan having another moan", and the only thing anyone will do is play "what time of day will Duncan rant" sweepstakes.

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!

Bollocks. Really decent guy in our team just left unexpectedly 😟

At the end of each day, work out exactly what you need to do next, and then...

...don't do it. Seriously. Make a note of it, save it, then walk away. Then you know *exactly* what you're getting started with the next day, and by the time you've done that you're in the swing of things. (Especially helpful if you're not a morning person like me. Much, much easier to get started if you know exactly what you're doing.)

Our entire grad program has just been cancelled by management because the intake isn't "diverse enough" - and this is after we've interviewed everyone, taken them through assessment centre days, and decided who we wanted to hire.

It's ok guys, you can waste hundreds of man hours of employee time, and shun all the great candidates who put time and effort in (some of whom were the very minorities they're trying to supposedly encourage) - as long as you do it in the name of diversity. Anyone disagrees, you can just call them a massive dick for apparently wanting an all white male workplace 😠