Current mood:
That irksome moment when you want to rant and vent about a particular workplace incident but wonder if your coworkers are on devrant too.
And they certainly might figure out no matter how cryptic you are.
*puts mask back on*

Breakdown of a casual work day:

50%- typing the same commands over and over again in my terminal and watching things build.
10% - lunch, coffee, attending nature’s calls, staring into space enjoying the headphone music.
10% - googling solutions. Only to find that 3 minutes later you’re reading a wikihow page on how to moonwalk.
10% - talking to fellow humans
10% - typing my password to unlock my computer. Mac users exclusive -typing keychain passwords
5% - contemplating what will happen if you suddenly get up and start dancing. Will you start a flash mob?
5% - random thoughts continue...why am I here? Why am I not partnering with Daft Punk to release a single?

I’m done with people that derail meetings and discussions.

While I want to seek feedback for an Interface that I wrote, these attention seekers decide it’ll be the perfect opportunity to bring up the topic of “how functional programming paradigm facilitates better encapsulation”.

Everyone else follow suit. I try “time checking” and bringing the talk back on track. Never worked.

I’m concluding that meetings are shit and a COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME.

Aha! The problem that you solved after a week long of thinking was already solved in 1800 AD and the code looks 100x better and optimal than yours.

I saw through times when having a computer at home was considered luxury.
I saw the days when there was no cellphones and only landline phones; One per house.
I saw the days when the internet was a thing that was only used to check emails; In browsing centres and offices.

Wait. All these in less than 2 decades!!
I feel ancient :(

Yet another day at work:

My job is to write test libraries for web services and test others code. Yes I know to code, and have a niche in software testing.
Sometimes developers (whose code I find bugs in) get so defensive and scream in emails and meetings if I point out an issue in their code.
Today, when I pointed a bug in his repo, a developer questioned me in an email asking if I even understood his code, and as a tester I shouldn’t look at his code and only blackbox test it.

I wish I can educate the defensive developer that sometimes, it’s okay to make mistakes and be corrected. That’s how we deliver services that doesn’t suck in production.

Lazy habit#1: Always Ctrl+C more than twice just in case the bugger fails to copy to the damn clipboard !!

Me: *opens a terminal in front of parents and starts a build script from command line. Logs start rapidly flooding the screen*

Mom: *whispers to dad proudly* “look at how much she has worked. Look how fast the lines are running on the screen!!

I didn’t wanna burst their bubble by explain them that their child is NOT doing any rocket science, and is something even they can do(maybe better).
So I responded back with a fake serious tone
“Yeah it’s all code.”
If only they knew what I was actually doing...

-Rant-
How do you (not) secure your Rest based web service?
1. Chain it to shady organic authentication system built by a hoard of monkeys high on Tequila.
2. have secret keys that get copy pasted into config flat files, and index them on your code search engine.
3. make the onboarding extremely platform specific that you need 500 environment variables, 50 scripts, 5 fancy device presses and a tap dance to make a GET call to the service.
4. fish through 500 rotating log files that the authentication system generates for each API call made.
5. Leave traces all over the host so if you have to start over, you should sudo rm -rf / and set fire to your computer.

Follow up to my (ignorant) previous rant.

Context: Eclipse vs intelliJ
Situation: Was too comfortable with eclipse. knew shortcuts in the back of my palm. Loved the light theme. Argued with anyone who blindly believed IntelliJ is better than eclipse.
Action: Forced myself to try IntelliJ. Stepped out of my comfort zone. Got a one day code block. Changed to darcula. My eyes struggled to read. My fingers typed usual eclipse shortcuts to discover unknown windows.
Verdict: after two days of learning and not giving up. I have started loving IntelliJ and I know why.
Moral: change is good. Get out of your comfort zone ;)

Okay so here are a few lessons that I have learned from being an intern to a junior developer (who’s just 2 years out of college).
- every ninja engineer starts off as a noob. There’s nothing to be ashamed of if you don’t know “everything” about coding
- Respect everyone’s opinion (including the one that shouts your design is crap in a meeting). Don’t process them too much.
- leave things that happen at work, in the workplace
- Keep yourself up to date even after you’ve bagged the 100,000$ offer. Never.stop.learning.
- Be polite to your interns (been there). They look up to you and treat their juniors the way you treat them.
- Be honest. Including your tiny scrum updates. If you need more time, tell it. If you’ve screwed up something , own it up.
- Never blame or point fingers.
- Nothing is irreversible.(except things like sudo rm -rf/)
- There’s always a way out(of any mess).
- Respect what came before.
- Respect what comes after (before you push badly written code)
- It’s ok to point out mistakes but Be kind. (Else you’ll end up in someone else’s rant ;-) )

The IDE discussion started again today. I am not an advocate of Eclipse but I didn’t find any compelling reason to switch to IntelliJ either. Maybe...just maybe I should try but that would mean just trying to be cool and I don’t know if it actually makes sense. So here’s how it went:
Me: okay give me one big reason why you want me to switch out of Eclipse.
Guy: slams desk and screams: Because Eclipse is slow! IntelliJ is fast and the community edition rocks
Me: in what way
Guy: oh come on. In every single way. I would rather choose notepad than Eclipse.
**curls into a ball and dies**

Rubber ducks

I will fix that in the next iteration.

Half fact: Code reviews help to maintain clean codebases.
Full fact: Code reviews are a way to find out who secretly wants you fired.