My tip for staying productive: **Don't**

Take a break. Take a few. Have a nap. Take a stroll outside. Enjoy life.

Life's too short. If you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong.

Fuck productivity.

Last year I changed jobs from a large multi-national to a small local agency (which happens to be run by friends of mine).

One of the reasons for doing this was that my work involved more office politics than *actual* software development, and had just plain stopped being fun.

Now, I am having fun again! An example?

For one of our clients we have to connect to (a lot) of third-party APIs. Often even SOAP APIs!

Now I hear you protest "But that is no fun at all! SOAP APIS SUCK!" Which is true, more often than not. 😔

BUT! My friend started an internal API-SNAFU Trello board. Every time you get bitten in the ass by some ill conceived fuck-up of an API, you get to add your complaint to the board.

Beside giving as something to reciprocally rant about, the board also serves a serious function: depending on the amount of fuck-ups an API has been known to make, the price for working with that API will go up.

Who said it doesn't pay to complain? 😀

When the madness known as "software development" gets me down, I visit DevRant to complain and read about people who have it harder than me.

I just wanted to offer my condolences... Ya'll are so much more fucked than I am. 👍

So... I need to implement something from a spec based on a set of standards that use another set of standards based on IETF RFC.

Decide to use a library that implements the original specs. Nothing works.

Read through all of the specs, researched the standards they used, read the RFCs.

Turns out the library doesn't implement the specs properly. Looks like I'll still have to implement my own.

🙄

So... I went to bed Thursday with a mild headache, which turned into a full migraine during the night.

Friday morning I couldn't even open my eyes. Had to stay in bed, sleeping through almost the entire day.

Saturday was slightly better, head still hurted enough to keep my bedridden.

Sunday I managed to leave the bed, eat something and wander around the house a bit. My wife and kids seemed a bit quiet and subdued but I was still to groggy to think anything of it.

This morning I wake up, feeling good enough to check the news and the work chat.

😱 WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?!?

I'm out of it for a day or two and the entire country has gone into #coronavirus lockdown!

On the roof of my friends house. On new years eve.
The party was too noisy for me to hear the client over the phone, so I was milling around the appertment until I no longer heard the noise.

Sat down, took laptop from backpack, solved issue, wished client a Happy New Year.

Packed in laptop. Stood up, realised I had somehow wandered out of the appartment and up onto the roof.

Sat down again. Vertigo.

Opened the laptop again, sending the client the bill at 500% overtime rate.

At least the fireworks were pretty.

After going through the regular process of talking to HR/Recruitment and passing the casual interview with a team-mate for cultural compatibility, I got the task of grilling a candidate on some technical matters. This being a PHP job, we got to talking about PSRs (PHP Standards Recommendations).

As he seemed to take pride in his knowledge of PSRs, I decided to focus more closely on that.

So we got to a recomendation regarding dependency injection containers. Nothing special, and he seemed to know his stuff. At that point, he made a statement that parts of that recommendation were a bit stupid.

Now, I hate to put people in their place, but his statement did not match what that specific PSR stated. So I gently tried to correct him. The candidate, being on fire thus far, pointed out that I should trust him on this, as he clearly knew his stuff.

Again, I didn't like having to do this, but I also did not like him having a misconception about a topic he was, otherwise, really on top of...

So I asked him to trust *me*, as I was one of the writers who contributed to the standard.

The true test here, of course, wasn't if he knew all the minutia of every standard but how he would react to being corrected.

We, as developers, are wrong all the time. Its how we learn and evolve. So being able to accept that is vital.

Sadly, he did not respond too well and sunk into a bit of a sullen silence. At first I though maybe I'd scared him or that he was afraid of having made a gaff but it soon turned out he genuinly did not like being wrong.

Sadly, I had to advise against hiring him.

So... This company was in trouble. They hire me to help fix things and build this nice new stack to get rid of their old legacy monster application.

I'm there for three weeks when one of their top investors storms in. Apparently they are turning less profit than they told me during my interview. (Yeah, it is one of the things I always ask, even thought I don't always get an answer).

So this investor/shareholder guy starts on this motivation speech which is basically a veiled threat that "we" need to do better.

Obviously he doesn't know anyone in the room other than the boss. And it was apparent, at least to me, he also has 0% knowledge of anything related to software development. The boss doesn't look to happy about having to let this happen.

Then the guy turns to me. He points his finger at me and demands to know how failing so badly makes me feel...

So I answered truthfully... "I've only been here for three weeks, so I don't think I've been failing too much, yet. Now, how long did you say you've been throwing money at this failure without getting the return you wanted?" Emphasizing the "you" by pointing right back at him.

That doesn't shut the guy up, but he does bring his "motivational" speech to a rapid close.

He doesn't bother saying goodbye when he stormed out again, not even to the boss, who looks a lot happier at this point.

Apparently the guy pulled this stunt every couple of months (or weeks, if he was bored enough). After this encounter, he apparently had enough of trying to "motivate" us developers. We I didn't see him again in the 2 years I worked with the company after that.

I got a pay raise the month after. Apparently that was totally unrelated to this incident... 😙🎵