I'm trying to refactor a Java microservice which seems to be written like an hellish 2000s enterprise system: nonsensical usage of inheritance and overcomplicated solutions with unneeded design patterns (that way the junior which developed it could show which he done his homework) and a bad knowledge of the platform on which everything is written has created a damn lasagna code which breaks in many points every time you touch it and to make things worse unit tests are strongly coupled to the implementation so they need to be modified after most changes to the code (defeating the whole purpose of TDD). After spending two days seeing crash logs on my terminal I've lost my mind, grabbed a baby yoda plush which was in my bedrom and I ripped it to pieces while I was listening to Black Sabbath to discharge all my frustration.
Now, after I've cleared my mind, I decided to just rewrite the whole fucker and call it refactoring (rewriting instead of refactoring is usually the way with microservices but is discouraged where I work because it makes you BaD TEaM PlaYER), probably no one would look into it anyway.

It’s me or Scrum trivialize developer’s skill development? My company replaced almost all the training with Googling and “peer to peer training” in which some junior with no teaching experience prepares a presentation/lesson on some technology and then shows it to others.
Following this logic with all the true crime which I’ve watched I should be a detective.

At work I have to multitask on way too many projects and to make it worse there is a lot of red tape and I have to waste a lot of time surfing buggy documentation websites, switching VPNs and praying for CI/CD to work rather than writing code in the fucking editor and for me repetitive tasks and context switching are productivity killers since they prevent me to enter in a state of flow and I keep daydreaming or distracting myself.

There are indie devs which still builds games for the NES or the first GameBoy... and then we have Apple which goes to extra lenghts to ensure which nobody can develop, publish or install new apps on devices which are too old for the newer iOS versions.

I'm in love with F#, the tooling can be a little buggy if you're used to TypeScript or Java but before learning it I've never been able to solve a real life problem with less than 10 lines of code

I'm the only one which finds really frustrating when you return to a framework or a language after a year in which you haven't used it and you're forced to Google how to do any trivial thing with it again?
It must be the 6th time I search how to do things with the C# library System.Text.Regex.

I'm building a desktop Java application, the build is running from 20 minutes and it keeps going... and people still mocks C++ for being slow in building

Hipsterism aside, the point in user Brave instead of Chrome/Firefox

Apple should implement a Team Viewer like system on his iOS devices or allow 3rd party developers to do it, when random relatives call because they don’t know how to do X with their phones/pads I always find quite awkward to guide them by voice since there are a lot of misunderstandings doing that.

Despite some annoying bugs attributable to the young age of the project Neovide rocks!

It’s a huge nightmare to develop a React front-end when:
- you have to adapt Bootstrap 3/jQuery based components to React
- the “back-end” is a sparse collection of micro services with cryptic URLs and finding the correct name means searching on a laggy WSO2 API manager
- the documentation of said micro services can be outdated and that means wasting a lot of time trying requests on cURL rather than in doing actual development and continuously breaking your concentration
- sometimes the micro services just become unavailable altogether
- the back-end shuts down at
6PM everyday, usually when after I finally achieved a flow and I’m doing meaningful progress

From this week I have to respond to three different managers and being a “deep work” advocate I suck ass in multitasking. Amazing!

We should find a way to replace passwords: any password manager which I tried is inaccurate in identifying login forms and is too hard to use for non technical people older than 40 and convince people to not use some stupid name + birth year combination as their passwords is a frustrating uphill battle.

I love C and C++ but their dependency management stuck, there’s a package manager for them which offers a nice experience comparable to Go or Rust?

I'd like to hear from developers which prefers Angular to React the reason of said preference.
I want to hear that becasue I like React way more than Angular since I find which is easier to learn (making a form with a React hook is easy while it takes days just to get a grip on Angular forms), it usually takes less code to do things, it doesn't force libraries which may not be necessary for your use case and just makes your bundle bigger (for example most things which are done in NgRx can be done just as easily with regular JS promises without the need of an external tool) and I generally prefer functional programming to OOP.
Said that I want to hear the other side, not to argue but because I want to know cases in which Angular may be a better choice than React to become a better rounded dev.

I love to develop for the web, i find JavaScript a nice language and I love the unmatched flexibility of the web platform but i hate when I have to work with the unstable or badly documented APIs which seems to be the norm in the enterprise world: wasting hours in forced breaks because suddenly the API returns nothing but 503 or the VPN suddenly dies, wasting lot of time to find the documentation you need in the slow and cumbersome enterprise API manager, making lots of tests with cURL/Paw/Postman/wethever trying to find out why a request which should work just doesn't... in these moments I envy desktop and mobile devs. The worst part of it is which microservices made everything worse since nowadays there are way more "moving parts" which can break making the API you need unavailable and unlike with monoliths often it's hard to just clone a back-end, populate a database and then work fully locals since now everything depends on a lots of things which are hard/almost impossible to replicate on your laptop.

People pressure me to get a degree but I think which I’ll pass, I don’t care about getting into research or management and if Carmack and Romero did what they did with little formal education I guess which I can be a good enough programmer to distinguish myself in my area without it.

Unpopular opinion: I find most office gimmicks which have been popularized by FAANG companies are stupid.
I don’t care about pool tables/videogames/nerf guns, I find these things fun but I’m not 9 therefore I don’t need them at my workplace, I can take care of myself so I don’t need mindfulness seminaries, if I get interested by the topic I’m able to provide myself books or seminaries and don’t get me with the salary I get every month and don’t get me started about the trend of office dogs: most dogs needs a lot of attention and are high energy animals, that’s not what I would need around me when I’m making an urgent bug fix.
Luckily my company hasn’t got into this shit and understands which all an adult professional needs is “just” a good pay and a good work environment.

What’s more annoying than being distracted from your actual work by colleagues to make a couple of HTTP calls which can be done by them in minutes since they have everything but requires you to switch context and waste almost an hour in retrieving credentials reading documentation and filling Postman forms?

It makes sense to learn AI and its mathematical basis (statistics and linear algebra) or unless I want to get a degree on the topic I’m wasting my time? If the answer is yes what are the best online resources/books which I can use?
To clarify I don’t want to specialize there and work as a “AI/data science specialist” (for which I believe a degree it’s necessary) as some graduates in shady boot camps expects to do. I’m just asking myself if I can teach myself enough IA to enrich personal projects in which IA makes sense and to become apre flexible professional.

I used to be deeply in love with programming and IT, I keep teaching myself language and tricks and I’m always enthusiastic of new challenges but since I saw a video of GitHub Copilot this Saturday I feel stuck in a rut. I used to find programming and IT skills which differentiated me from many of my peers but now it doesn’t feel special anymore, just glorified typing which can be replaced by a robot anytime in the future, my motivation is destroyed.

Someone else had to work with that turd of WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus?
I hate everything of it: its fucking buggy IDE (a lazy fork of Eclipse in which they didn't even bothered to replace the Eclipse icon), its cryptic XML language which makes basic operations such as accessing a JSON field a complete PITA, its fragility (often syntax errors doesn't get caught by the compiler but causes runtime errors which are hard to diagnose) its shitty testability...

After almost 3 years of professional experience I’d like to specialize more in something but I struggle to because I enjoy almost every aspect of IT: I find front-end really fun, I find very rewarding to build good user experiences and I’m excited for what WASM may bring on the table but I even like to work on the back end on both: legacy monoliths and modern micro services, I love to refactor clunky programs full of “cargo cult” code and redundancies put by people who doesn’t understand the framework they’re using and to make them shine. I’m even good at UNIX/Linux scripting and with Docker (often colleagues asks me advice on these topics) so I’m really tempted to upgrade my knowledge by learning K9S and reading the 1000+ pages of Unix Power Tools to get into operations/DevOps especially considering which the field is the least likely to be overrun by cheap developers coming from a 3 months boot camp.
On top of that I’ve got even into more theoretical topics: I’m following a course on algorithms and data structures in C and in future I want to learn the basics of AI for a personal project but these things aren’t much about employment but personal culture.
Have you got any advice for this disoriented young man?

It’s me or Vim on Windows Terminal is barely usable?
I resorted to doubling my laptop’s ram (luckily Dell still produces laptop which can be upgraded and repaired with a set of common screwdrivers) in order to be able to install a FreeBSD VM in which I can finally get a decent terminal based development environment. Sadly since for my work I need a VPN which can run only on Windows and MacOS I cannot just remove Windows and switch to FreeBSD or Linux but I have to make a VM and route its network traffic through work VPN.

Fuck pair programming
Fuck mob programming
Fuck all that hipster shit!

My employer should burn his DevOps system to the ground: esoteric configuration split on 1000 files, bugs and downtime almost daily, not communicated breaking changes which breaks pipelines, shitty documentation, few opportunities for customization and for everything you have to open a fucking ticket, I love programming but since I have to spend more time on a fucking ticketing system rather than on Vim my motivation is gradually falling to pieces.

My roommate is a damn wannabe programmer: he keeps talking about how much he’s passionate into technology, buying hardware, spending hours into arranging his workstation to be as “cool looking” as possible, talking about future big projects, he even wants the fucking Java and Arduino logos embroidered in his backpack the only issues are that I’ve never seen him spending time in a project which going beyond literal hello world and if I offer him help to help and improve (I’m an employed programmer) he refuses because he’s tired/lacks time (but always make it for Netflix). I’d be still ok with that because I believe in living and letting live but now every time he starts to bore me with his lengthy stories about projects he’ll never do I imagine him with a big clown nose 🤡

Why people uses Python for OS scripting? What’s the point in forcing me to download a proper interpreter to run a script when the same result can be achieved with a more portable and cleaner Bash/PowerShell script?!?!

In few months I went from working independently on a project while developing lots of vertical knowledge to being body rented to another company where I spend most of my time doing calls and continuously reworking a suite of over engineered micro services (after ages instead of progressing we’re rewriting for the nth time basic CRUD because the team keeps coming with new refactoring ideas and since budget/time limit aren’t tight nobody on the high management seems to care of the time we’re wasting). I miss being able to stay “in the zone” for hours without calls, being challenged and learning on the job so I’m considering to find another job.