I tried to contact a big German company about an API endpoint we might want to build a connection to. The docs are behind a login. I request login info through a form and get a mail that my request will be checked and I'll hear from them in 2-3 days. Because my boss wants this info until Friday, I try to call them.
First try: "we currently have a disruption in our phone central, please try again later"
2nd try: "sure, I'll put you through! *beep beep* - connection broke off
3rd try: "this number is not in use" (I used redial, didn't make a typo)
4th try: same as the 2nd try, again.
German red tape and technology at its finest. Fml.

At a cafe, usually. I've found this cool coder meetup on Saturday mornings. A couple of techies just working on their laptops or socializing, depending on the mood. I'm more motivated with other people working around me.

TLDR: Apparently I'm expected to be an egoïstic asshole on the workfloor.
We had a new guy starting on my small, now 4 person team. Technically all important things are supposed to be set up on new people's workstations already when they walk in the door on their first day. Think about Docker, links to repositories, stuff like that.
Not in this case.
I spent a good deal of the afternoon helping him getting set up so he can be a productive member of the team, too.
The next thing I hear from my teamlead is "why are you helping him, why is this taking so long? Ask for help if you can't figure it out!"
Bitch, I am figuring it out alright, only it's not one thing, it's 10 things by now. And if people had configured this workstation correctly, this wouldn't be necessary. What am I supposed to do, let him sit there doing nothing???
10 mins after we got him running, I get another comment that "I didn't work on 'huge ass story we've been busy with for a few weeks" much yet. Bitch, I've been doing nothing else for 1.5 weeks until I started helping our newbie.
FFS.

We found out today that one of our customers uses our cloud software through a remote desktop with IE on Windows XP. What the fuck? They are a multinational corporation with God knows how much revenue a year, and they still use XP???
We found out because logging in didn't work anymore for them, so they sent a screenshot. 😶

My German bank really needs some better mobile devs. I just tried to do a bank transfer. For some reason, it strips away all letters out of a previously saved IBAN number, and only gives you a keypad for input, so you can't even change it back -.-

Remember this rant? https://devrant.com/rants/2049166/...
How the fuck is their search still broken? It's a portal with hundreds of thousands visitors each day. -.-!

I have a large code review open for a couple of days now. All of my colleagues had the chance to give feedback, which I applied to my code where necessary. I had given them 3 feedback rounds and hoped that that would be enough for them. Now today, after I thought I was finally done, senior colleague A drops 24!!! comments on me about it, and tells me about it in a cheerful voice. Dude, you had the chance to request those deep-going changes 3 fucking times before today already. And you were the one complaining that the story wasn't done yet last Friday. Fuck off.

The first Dutch devRant meetup 2019 was amazing, thanks everyone for attending, it was awesome meeting you all!

Someone call a dev, this website is sick!
I'm talking about the website of the German train company (Deutsche Bahn).
Their ticket information and selling module has not being feeling well for a couple of days now.
Symptoms include:
- error 500 pages when trying to find a connection through their search
- not being able to book tickets
- being able to book tickets, but receiving them twice
- being charged twice for one ticket
- not being able to download tickets you bought
Suggested treatment: If you were charged too much, you have to send them a letter by postal mail to get your money back.
Or buy a ticket directly at the train station.
What year is this? 🤔😐

Can we stop the undifferentiated EU bashing already?
Yes, the copyright law changes suck, we get it.
But: The EU itself is not a bad thing. Millions of people profit from it by having a common currency, freedom of choice where to travel to, where they want to work without needing a visa, and many, many more things.
Appreciate that.
Thanks for your time, have a nice day.

Becoming a dev at all, I'd say. I started off with only knowing the basics, and am working in my third language. But I love the challenge.

!Rant:
Today's a good day.
I've been re-teaching myself proper CSS in combination with Vue after a long time of doing nearly only Backend coding or bootstrap. And all that while sitting in my favorite café all afternoon.
Speaking of CSS. What's your favorite preprocessor, and why? Or do you not use one?

Dear IT world,
As long as it still happens that women who attend IT lectures are referred to as "visual upgrades" by the lecturer after class, then nobody needs to wonder why IT isn't considered a welcoming field for women to work in, for many women.
Sincerely, a dev who loves code but is done with sexist bullshit.

A bruised arm and shoulder and 2 nights of crappy sleep later, I was finally tired enough today to consistently try to type 'console.log()' in PHP code in order to debug stuff. Good night devRant, and may the weekend come soon.

Recruiters are getting cheekier by the day. One of them sent me a LinkedIn connection request and right afterwards a message saying "thanks for accepting my request". I did not accept your request, and with that kind of audacity, I never will. K thanks bye.

A devRant meetup in The Netherlands.
Sounds interesting? Keep reading ;)
I'm in the early stages of putting a Dutch devRant meetup together again. I'm aiming for next month some time. If you live in NL, Belgium or are willing to make the trip from further away, awesome! The language will be English, anything else is still in planning and ofc open to negotiations. I set up this date and location picker for Friday to Sunday around the weekends in April. https://datumprikker.nl/psxrr8ebwpj... Other times would be good too if we can just get enough people together. Any suggestions / questions? Drop me a comment. Do please share this post to anyone who might want to come! Happy Ranting!

Things that made me happy today:
- solving 3 bugs
- being able to help out a colleague
- my contract being extended (yay!)
- chocolate Easter eggs
Things that I didn't like today:
- that fucking strong wind I had to bike through
- it's Monday.
- the rough tone of conversation in the office today. One of my (generally very nice) colleagues showed his good mood today in making even more sexually explicit jokes / comments than usual today. Even though most of them they were not directed at me directly, I was bad at coping with that today. If this continues, I'll mention it to him, and hope he'll understand. When our Gitlab went down at 5 I decided to call it a day.
Thanks for your time if you read until now. Have a nice day

I did a mixed degree, CS and linguistics. In terms of the programming knowledge I picked up, it was about as useful as w3schools. Good for the basics, but the rest I either figured out myself or learned on the job. I did learn a lot in general though, and made an awesome friend and met people from all over the world. So yeah, the bottom line is: I think it was worth it. I think it did help with one or two job interviews too, but the reaction was never more than "oh, you have an MA degree, nice"

Where do you personally draw the line between "good enough" and "not good enough" code?
I just spent a considerable amount of time refactoring a function into 4 sub functions. The original one was fetching alerts for 4 related entities. All of the alerts are needed together in one dataset. A lot of variables and some of the logic was shared, therefore I originally chose to keep it as one, admittedly very large function. Where do you guys draw the line between refactoring or not refactoring in cases like these? How much weight do you give to separation of concerns vs simplicity? I'm curious.

So my heater is broken. I'm very tempted to try and install Android studio as a replacement heater

It's a twisted feeling when your team decides to fix up their unit tests and not just mock everything. Yay, because it's now done correctly. "Are you fucking kidding me?!" when you realize that that means you now have to add tons of new instances of classes that the main one now needs, now that it's no longer mocked. 😑😐🙃

I'm a language nerd. I could go on discussing random details of a language for hours. And I can't help spotting spelling errors pretty much anywhere.

Hi from FOSDEM! It's awesome so far. So many cool technologies and people, it's amazing!

So apparently management didn't have a design made for that new shiny but small feature (touchscreen keyboard plus implementation) because they thought it could easily be done without, "just like that". 😑
The result: me standing next to their desk asking for specifications and details how they want things done 5 times in a day.
And frankly, that the story only consisted of 3 bullet points didn't help either.
Part of me felt like yelling "software isn't magic, nothing works "just like that!!" at them.

1) there is proper, well-written documentation for everything, in English.
2) make clients send in a decent description of what they think it's going wrong, with screenshots where needed.
3) make me smart enough to figure out what's going on if 1) and 2) do not apply.

@Condor, @linuxxx, @404response, @Arch4ng3l are you guys up for FOSDEM? Let's meet up! Maybe over food or drinks?
@PonySlaystation any chance you're attending too?
Anyone else is welcome to join, too, ofc!

Who of you will be at FOSDEM 2 weeks from now, in Brussels? For those who don't know it: It's an open source convention on February 2/3. No tickets needed, you can just show up there. More info: https://fosdem.org/2019/

Dealing with special characters in JS is a ducking pain in the rear end. I recreated a virtual keyboard for vuejs today, and properly escaping all special characters according to the library I used AND according to JS itself was a damn pain.
I'm done being a human for today. Tonight I will roll up in a blanket and pretend to be a burrito.

TLDR: I hate SOAP so much I threw a Hamsterball against the wall.
I had to make a call to an API endpoint with SOAP today. I had the correct credentials. And the fucker refuses to let me in, claiming "invalid credentials". I even recreated the request via postman to make sure I didn't have faulty code. But nope, same story.
I even contacted their support team, which gave me an initial reply within 3mins that tells me to check the credentials and sends me a link to the error code explanation (really? thanks, I did read that.) and then closed the ticket. I answer: "well nice, but I checked that. The credentials are correct"
Them: "One of my colleagues will look into it and will respond to you within a couple of days." 😑
This blocks my story. Fuckin' awesome.
And this, kids, is the story of how I threw a Hamsterball against the wall.

me: *submits a PR on our old system*
My teamlead: please mind the code style, there was no need to add the extra whitespace line under that loop.
Me: 🤔 there are style conventions in this project??
-----
NB: this is really old code with tons of long lines, weird spacing and whitespace in random places and functions that span hundreds of lines.
I seriously did not notice a consistent style here.
I wanna go back to working on the new system ☹️