I finally actually used a map reduce in code. Time to apply to Google!

I find myself making a Scooby Doo 'yoink' every time I hit 'y' to yank (aka copy) in vim.

If I was in an office it could be an issue but not now...

Oh thank god for coffee.

Having one of those days where every slight criticism feels like a personal attack (they're not, I have very nice co-workers) and every small task makes me want to just go back to bed because I'm so useless...

So, I've been working as a developer for 15 years almost. I recently started what could reasonably be described as my dream job. As in absolutely fucking awesome. Really interesting product, sane technology, nice co-workers, decent salary, 100% remote.

So, why am I suffering from motivation issues? I find it difficult to get started on the simplest tasks. and looking at the check-ins from my coworkers is intimidating. I had a phase of burnout previously so I'm watching that in myself too...

So far the best solutions I've found are.
1 Coffee, lots of coffee.
2 quick catch-up calls so that I'm reassured I'm actually doing the right work and the quality is good enough.
3 following TDD strictly and not thinking too far ahead on each iteration. (I recommend "99 bottles of OOP")

Dunno if I would say I've become a good coder.
I regularly see stuff written by others and think, holy shit I couldn't manage that.

But somehow I've built a career out of people telling me what they need and me producing solutions for them. So they pay me.

I'm fairly personable, ask questions, listen to answers, when I fuck up (which is still just as often as 15 years ago) I take responsibility.

On the tech side, just keep doing it. Tackle one problem after another. Ask others and of course:
https://9gag.com/gag/aj9xAmG

So, so can anyone recommend a wired track pad. Bluetooth sucks monkey nuts.

So, my experience is all with relational DBs (mssql) mainly and this job is the first time I've had to deal with mongodb.

I'm using the default compass client and I'm struggling with just how shit it is.
- A default font size of 5px high which resets every time it starts.
- Total lack of keyboard shortcuts.
- Inconsistent expansion& folding behaviours
- No saving of aggregates/queries if you accidentally click on another collection.
- ittle bitty query window which is actually multi line but with no scrollbar...
The list goes on.

And mongodb, whoever thought JavaScript is an appropriate query language... It's not.
It's probably because I don't have enough experience with it but the mix of quotes and $ seems so random...

Sometimes, I run tests just because I want a break from writing code. In good cases it's so that I take a moment to think about what I'm going to do next. In most cases however, I'm struggling for motivation

Really? Fucking really?
"This role starts out with a one-week, unpaid trial to gauge work speed and compatibility"

https://www.python.org/jobs/4433/

I'm based in Germany and I'm negotiating a job with an American company. Does anyone have experience with the best legal setup for this? Direct employment, setting up my own company and employing myself or freiberufler?

You know what the worst type of screwups are? Those that have already happened but you don't know about yet.

There you are, coasting along, thinking everything's OK, blissfully unaware that you're fucked. And no matter what you do, you're still fucked.

Sometimes it's nice to talk to recruiters.

I find it's a great ego booster

I was watching this fantastic talk on coding through refactoring:
https://m.youtube.com/watch/...

Highly recommended....
And it got me all enthusiastic about coding again and then I realised, at my last work place, the "we value code quality" corporate hellhole you'd be criticised for taking too long by management and for changing too much code by coworkers.

And a month later, you'd come back to the code and some other coworker would have jammed in a bunch of extra if statements and absolutely fucked your nice structure....

In the back of a moving car while there were anti western protests going on outside.

So, we've been on Deutsche Telekom for about 9 months. Shitty connection in the countryside but literally not one outage.

For the last 6 weeks our internet has been dropping out with no obvious cause.

Just this week we start getting calls if we'd like to upgrade to a package with LTE...

I'm finding the coincidence just a little too convenient.

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

I have a picture of breaking waves above my desk. I lean back, remember times I was out on my surfboard just sitting in the water. Sometimes I make some green tea and just breath.

If that doesn't work, black coffee, somafm EDM and stress the fuck out until it's done.

Currently waiting in the doctor's office and the pc on the table is making so much noise... I have an itch to fiddle with it, maybe get a can of compressed air and clean it out. Though given that it's a doctor's office, not until I get gloves and a mask.

1) keeping my shit together until my 3 month notice period is done.
2) moving cross country.
3) starting a new job with a new tech stack which I'm not as experienced in.

Blue screen as I login? Yes, it is Monday morning, why do you ask?

Just fixing a broken build due to another bad merge by SVN. There was no reason it should have fucked that merge up but somehow it did.

Of course I didn't double check by building locally so that was my screwup but what I wouldn't give to use a decent source control tool

There's something very satisfying doing contract negotiations for your next job while you're stuck in a boring 4 hour meeting at your current shitty job.

One problem for CS education is that the salaries for academia are so low compared to industry that if someone is even vaguely competent, they can at least double their income by working a 'real' job. Now this may be different at higher levels of colleges but generally those folks are such bullshitters they wouldn't last outside of academia.

As what to improve?
Depends if it's a research or vocational course.

For vocational; heavy on group projects, common tools, methodologies and architectures. All demonstrated in something like c#/java/python. And one project must have a web app (db, app layer and JavaScript from end)
Basic knowledge of algorithms, runtime analysis (O notation) and some data structures and you're an instahire.

For research, go wild. Deep dive into the math, algorithmic side. Read up lots of research papers. Try out different programming paradigms. You would aim for a career in academia, AI, quant finance etc...

You know you're doing enterprise style agile when every two weeks requires a 20 person four hour meeting to go over what was actually implemented in the spring

So, my wife is in the hospital with two of the kids for an annual checkup. Should be nothing to worry about but still it's stressful and I want to be there.

I'd booked the day off (until the end of the week) and last week I got told, you've taken too many holidays, just the Friday is approved.

Ok, fine, I'll do some extra hours work from home and be there for the appointment. But fuck no, they schedule an "important" client meeting this morning and I'm required to attend.

TWO FUCKING HOURS and I contributed a sum total of 2 sentences which could have been filled in just as well by the other developer on the call

Just another reason I'm happy to be interviewing at other companies.

Question; if you've got a team member who's been phoning it in during the last few sprints and their inattention causes extra work for others, what do you do?

- Have a private word directly one to one.
- Say nothing but bitch amongst yourselves
- Complain to the team lead
- Call them out during a daily standup and tell them they're producing shit.

Any opinions?

My very first experience with a computer was a Mac 512Ke which my parents bought to do accounts on.

I was too young to really get it but it had the games Zork 2, a flight sim called fire fox (I think) and some painting program.

What actually got me into programming was when I was at a friend's and we were trying to get dune 2 to work and his older brother stepped in, did some command line unzip and then hey! It worked.

Bit he was such an arrogant prick about us not knowing how to start the program that I started learning myself how to use computers properly.

Well, thank fuck that day is done.

I spent 5 hours last night from 20:00 to 01:00 rewriting a class so it was understandable, testable and correct. It's not great but a shit load better than the pile of shit that was there before.

I'm actually quite proud of it. Of course, it'll be totally unseen by anyone but me. Is this the best enterprise Devs can hope for, lonely satisfaction of a job well done?

Right now, I'm doubting my reading skills.

I'm doing a feature acceptance presentation and half way through they're like "did you handle cases A, B and C?"

No.

Fuck.

Now it's got to be rushed in ...
And all because I can't read the spiderweb of requirement docs