I work with idiots.

That is all.

Years ago, I joined a company making games for handheld consoles.

Because a game's audio needs to be tested, too, I connected earphones to the console so that:
0. I wouldn't bother others w/ the sounds coming out of the console.
/* !Everyone wants to hear that crap. */
1. I could hear the sounds better.

PM: * Enters the room. *
Me: * Focused on testing the game. *
PM: * Walks up to me from the side, starts talking. *
Me: * Focused on testing the game. *
PM: * After approx. 30 seconds of complete lack of response from me, kind of irritated, knocks on my desk to get my attention. *
Me: * Take out the earphones. *
Oh, hi, how can I help you?
PM: Haven't you heard a word I said?
Me: Well, no. I am testing the game, including the audio.
PM: You need to pay attention to what's going on around you.
Me: Testing audio is one of my responsibilities. I am using earphones because of the reasons [0-1].
PM: Even still, you just need to pay attention to what's going on around you.
PM: * Finally explains the reason for him bothering me, then goes back to his lair. *

Moral of the story: Fuck being good at what you do && knowing your responsibilities.
When PM wants something from you, you better give him the attention he wants.

/* The expectation being I grow an extra pair of eyes && ears, so that I see the guy coming && am prepared to listen to him whenever he wants something _while_ doing the best job I possibly can. */

I've made some dub techno / drone with some free jazz samples:

https://youtube.com/watch/...

…and I think it’s beautiful.

Happy new year.

If I hear ONE MORE time "ChatGPT is like Google but better/smarter" I WILL choke a motherfucker to DEATH

New baby girl 🥰

Worryingly, at 4:04pm.

"2>/dev/null" is the command-line equivalent of "shut up, bitch".

Instead of age++, I now do lifetime--;

I‘ve not seen a single ad spam post today, so far.
Thank you @retoor!

This is getting really confusing now. How many people are left on here who aren't robots?

We need to update the slang "script kiddie" to "prompt enginot" or something.

So my boss's boss or someone even higher up drank the generative AI kool-aid and hired a 40-something kid to generate images for the marketing teams (or something like it).
Naturally, things soon went to shit.
The bloke already left, having staid less than six months on the job.
Guess who got to handle all the shit-is-currently-on-fire the kiddie left behind?

First impression: apparently, muggles tried to slak him some very broad descriptions of what they needed, and at first he actually tried to summarize those bark-speech pseudo-words into an actual prompt.
It does not seem to have gone for too long, though.
After users requested changes to the AI outputs, he would update the prompts, all right. And the process seemed to go fast enough... until reaching near-to-completion status.
Then users would request the tiniest changes to the AI output...
And the bloke couldn't do it.
Seriously. Some things were as simple as "we need this slider to go all the way up to 180% instead of 100%" on a lame dashboard and *kid. could. not. do. it.*.

In many cases he literally just gave up and copied the slak history into the AI prompt. No dice.

Bloke couldn't code a print('hello world') into a jupyter notebook cell, that's what i'm saying.
Apparently, he was "self taught", too. And was hired to "speed up the process of generating visual aids for usage in meetings and presentations". But then "the budget for this position was considered excessive" (meaning: shit results from a raw idea some executive crapped some day) and "the position was expanded to include the development of Business Inteligence Dashboards and Data Apps".

So now it is up to me (and my CRIMINALLY UNDERPAID team) to clean up his mess and maintain/fix/deprecate DOZENS of SHODDILY DESIGNED and MOSTLY USELESS but QUITE ACTIVE "data vis" PIECES OF SHIT.

Fuck "AI prompters", fucking snake oil script kiddies.

Traditional programming means spending *days or even weeks* to write instructions to make the software do what *you* want it to do.

AI modelling means spending *weeks or even months* to tweak instructions just to find that the software does whatever *it* wants to do.

How strict is the sexual harassment policy in this company?

95% of "in person" training courses for software developers are shit, change my mind if you can.

I've made the json protocol. It's a protocol containing only json. No http or anything.

To parse an json object from a stream, you need a function that returns the length of the first object/array of all your received data. The result of that function is to get the right chunk of the json to deserialize.

For such function, json needs to be parsed, so I wrote that function in C to be used with my C server and Python client. I finally implemented a C function into python function that has a real benefit / use case. Else you had to validate but by bit by the python json parser and that's slow while streaming. Some messages are quite big.

Advantage of this protocol is that it's full duplex.

I'm very happy!

Happy Diwali people 😤

Ive to work on my should've-been-a-day-off coz big meeting so y'all better celebrate in my stead 😤😤😤

Maybe there's nothing good left on this place because there's nothing good left in being a dev

Managers gettin horny when they realize that AI doesn't even need a free pizza party once a year to stay motivated

The fuck is it with the three or so "anti german" accounts?

My evening: going from 8e-5 seconds to 1.4e-5 seconds.

I'm pretty happy. I'm now 3x faster than the next fastest library available.

I feel like we should start trolling the spammers. They're sending us their contact details after all...

Question: Is Mary Jane Watson (MJ) an arachnophile?

"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"

So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.

First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.

So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.

Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?

I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.

Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?

"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"

So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.

More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!

I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.

And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.

"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."

You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!

"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."

I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.

So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

"A different error message! Finally some progress!"

A young guy I work with burst into tears today, I had no idea what happened so I tried to comfort him and ask what was up.

It appears his main client had gone nuts with him because they wanted him to make an internet toolbar (think Ask.com) and he politely informed them toolbars doesn't really exist anymore and it wouldn't work on things like modern browsers or mobile devices.

Being given a polite but honest opinion was obviously something the client wasn't used to and knowing the guy was a young and fairly inexperienced, they started throwing very personal insults and asking him exactly what he knows about things (a lot more than them).

So being the big, bold, handsome senior developer I am, I immediately phoned the client back and told them to either come speak to me face-to-face and apologise to him in person or we'd terminate there contract with immediate effect. They're coming down tomorrow...

So part my rant, part a rant on behalf of a young developer who did nothing wrong and was treated like shit, I think we've all been there.

We'll see how this goes! Who the hell wants a toolbar anyway?!

Next I start a new job as Android developer, wish me luck 🤧😌

You wanna know what my problem with chatgpt is? It's that it cannot form a FUCKING OPINION.

I have a few guesses on how that can be sorted, but peeps who are already afraid of AI will freak the fuck out when it starts saying "in my opinion..." LOL.

Also, did they ban the thing from making predictions? Like, simple probability. It can't do. 🫤

Changed home wifi password to "Don't ask me shit"
and my dad asked for the password for his new device
guess how it ended
😂🤣