My job quickly went down the shitter. A mass exodus happened, with half of top talent leaving, and the other half let go. The gig started out great, and offered me the growth I needed at the time, but sadly, life changes and moves on.

Determined to leave amicably on my own terms, I started looking elsewhere about a month ago.

I got an offer today! It's a perm position to offer stability to my fam, but with a consulting firm, so I'm excited for the relatively consistent change of pace with projects, technologies and clients. After spending years on end working on good projects that fizzled out and never saw the light of day, I'm longing to have my code released to the wild! (Not counting various patches and bug fixes)

Wish me luck!

I fucking hate apple so goddamn much. They make it next to impossible to connect or reset an old account from 10+ years ago for any modern services unless you are invested in their ecosystem and use it everyday for everything. Have not had any issues with old app accounts connecting through Google. Just sayin

Got my first legit side-gig as a developer (like had to write an SOW and everything): my kids' pediatrician is amazing, but shes switching to a concierge practice, meaning she wont take any insurance, and shes going from about 1500 patients down to about 200. I already pay my mortgage-worth in insurance on a monthly basis, so we were prepared to say adios to her. At my daughter's last appointment, she pulled me aside and said "what can we do to keep you guys as patients?" and i somewhat jokingly suggested "I dunno, need any websites written?"

As a matter of fact, she did: she just fired her practice's web developer, who gave her a shitty wordpress site and fought like hell to avoid any further maintenance or updates for her. She hates the site's current layout (no surprise there) so she is basically giving me full control over a rewrite.

No user logins, no worries about compliance with PII or any of that. Literally just turning a brochure wordpress site into an angular app, hosting it on her own server and eventually building an admin page where she can change the banner text and upload new images.

And my kids will get free, top-notch health care.

I would not consider myself an overachiever by any means, but I must say, I'm quite satisfied with my contributions this year at the new (relatively speaking) job. I got to go back to writing code almost every day, all day, and that sure as hell beats being in meetings all the goddamn time.

let me preface with the fact that I'm now known at my new job for being the resident cli hipster. I can't lay any claims to knowing if it's "better" but I like it, I don't care if you do or don't, it just works for me and my flow

so at my job, we generally squash all our commits into one commit and delete the source branch upon merging; i accidentally committed all my work to an old, already merged branch, so my boss tells me it would be more of a PITA with the weird references we would encounter by merging the branch again, rather than just cherry pick the commits into a new branch, which i'm like "eh, fine.".

HIM: "You want to share your screen so we can resolve this?"
ME: "k"
HIM: "Oh, you won't be able to do this in a terminal, you are going to have to load up a GUI of some sort"
ME: "lawlz, no you don't"
HIM: "i highly doubt you will be able to accomplish that, but if you wanna make an ass of yourself, i'll humor you"
ME: "yeah, watch this"

> git log > log.txt
> git checkout <new branch>
> git cherry-pick <copy-paste-full-commit-hash-here>
> git push

ME: "done"
HIM: "what? there's no way you did it that easily, where are all your other commits???"
ME: "i usually try to amend my commits since we squash them anyhow. it really helps in situations like this"
HIM: "well, you go girl"

roll that up in your fancy degree and smoke it, why don't ya?

Product was not thrilled with our estimates we gave them for the next phase of our project. So they got the veep to give us 2 new team members - a new hire and an existing senior - in hopes that it will allow us to finish a lot sooner.

Because 9 women can make a baby in a month, right? Gods forbid we consider removing anything from the scope of this phase. Mind you, there's still another phase planned after this one before we even release the product.

Did my first meaningful work in angular in many moons at work today - also apparently the first time I've touched it in 4 major version releases lol.

I typically find myself specializing in API and service architecture lately, so I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I got back into the swing of things with the front end in general. Granted the app itself has been very neatly organised and written which goes a very long way to helping one find their way quickly.

That said, I really can't admit to having any desire to stay working in angular for very long. Yes, I think it speaks well to the framework itself that I can pick up immediately going from version 8 to 12 without any issue, but also, I think angular kinda sucks ass*.

* Opinion should be taken with a grain of salt coming from a .NET dev. This does not reflect the views of .NET or other devs in general. User results may vary.

While it's totally not without its valid use cases, I fucking hate pair programming.

Well, let me elaborate. I hate *remote* pair programming. It completely disrupts my flow and wastes so much time with additional water cooler nonsense, and pedantic argument for the sake of participation. Not to mention "oh hey let me see how you did this... Oh, you know what, I think it would be better to do it this way...". Ok, great, we weren't even discussing that, but sure, let's completely detail this session to refactor something that could have come up at a good transition point, like I dunno, say a code review?

Like I said, there are very good reasons to pair program, but I would much prefer rubber ducking wherever possible.

my new PineTime smartwatch just arrived!

Lol these dumbasses actually think I'm smart. They have no idea that I just always have the same problem the day before them and I found an answer just before they ask me.

Took my first PTO today since joining the new company to get my wisdom teeth extracted. Already took care of that first thing this morning. Now I actually get to kick back and listen to some records until my new GPU is delivered, and then I get to fuck off the rest of the weekend with new games because my wife says I can't do any yard work this weekend.

Only had the top two extracted because I was born without the bottoms I guess. But less pain on my wallet and my jaw, I'll happily trade in the narcotics they gave me and stick to my scotch.

Not a bad 3 day weekend in my book. Ill have to go back and figure out who/what broke the projection runner in the sandbox environment when I go back, but eh. that's a Monday problem now. 😎

never underestimate the benefits of a power nap.

!dev

Got me a new mouse pad since the only one I had was branded with my last jobs logo. Mordor is right where I usually rest my hand so it will eventually get dirtier and therefore more evil.

!dev

One of the worst weekends of my adult life. I'm flying to attend my best friends funeral tomorrow. My flight is delayed over 6 hours by a cyclone that already passed over my house 3 days ago. And I am still in my 90 days at my new job so I can't take any PTO and have to take a redeye Monday morning and be back online for standup.

It really irritates me when other engineers of various levels get hung up on pedantic, low hanging fruit bullshit in my merge requests. Like really, why keep a thread going just to force me to explain why I chose to make a particular magic string a constant that you don't see a use for? What about all the infrastructure setup code I spent 3 days on? Did you even read any of that to make sure it was sound and that my dumb/drunk/tired ass didn't make an obvious mistake, or could have done it better?

My gods, writing software for an *actual* software company now, it truly amazes me just how frustrating my life has been for years...

Went into the office today to turn in my badge and gun (security badge/parking pass and yubikeys really) since I'm pretty much being given my last week before changing jobs to do brain dumps for knowledge transfer, and fuck all else.

Found a jar of moonshine in a closet when I went to take my things. IT said I could keep it. Not a bad parting gift.

So the last 2 devs who I really looked up to and respected at my company peaced out within the last 2 months. So I began seriously chasing offers while the market was hot. The new bigwigs that were brought in at the company knew I was one of the biggest flight risks, so they threw more money at me without me asking for it.

I just got an offer from a company that I really like that matched the salary that I was bumped to - to them it exceeds my expectations because they did not know about this preemptive bump.

Best part is, I applied to this company on my own, the old fashioned way. No recruiter as my hype person or negotiator. I made a good impression on them myself.

No, wait, the real best part - they offered me a senior level role after seeing my code in a day-long working interview (virtual of course). I mean I had to do some shit with RabbitMQ, which I had heard about and seen in passing, but never worked with before, which to my own surprise, I got working in a matter of a few hours. Blows my mind that someone outside of my old company actually thinks I'm good.

No, wait, the REAL real best part: I've spent the last 4 years - a large majority of my professional career - at my current company. I experienced a lot of growth, but they shoehorned me into a development manager role, which bummed me out as i found myself getting farther and farther away from the code. I'm so excited to get a fresh start and go back to spotify + code for 10 hours a day.

I read somewhere at the start of the global pandemic: when it comes to work from home life, you should never underestimate the benefits of a power nap.

My gods, that person was right! I only wish I had taken advantage of it more over the last year.

so I have a junior who merged in a fix for an issue yesterday, and it was tested today and there was an issue with his "fix".

so he comes to me and says "hey this is an issue" and i'm like "yeah, remember i told you about that yesterday when i tested your changes? why did it get merged?"

so i tell him "its because of <reason> and that's why i specified the approach that i did in the ticket originally"

so he's like "ok i'll try that" and before doing that i leave him with "you will probably want to do <thing> because of <reason> with that approach"

so fast forward to like 10 mins ago. literally half the fucking day has gone by.

"hey, so i can't get this to work"

"yeah its because <reason> but what you /can/ do is <same fucking thing i told him to do this morning>"

"oh ok, ill give that a shot :thumbsup: "

and yet he's had this chip on his shoulder since reviews because he feels like he should have gotten a bigger raise and he's worth more than he's paid. and wonders why after 3 years he still hasn't been promoted from a junior.

and don't fucking say 'that's above my pay grade' all the time like you aren't fairly compensated, and then struggle to employ the same fucking patterns in a code base you've worked with for 3 years now.

age++

unfortunately we have a new CTO and handful of senior level resources joining our company this week, and I've risen to too lofty a position to be able to take the day off.

but they are sorely mistaken if they expect me not to fuck off to at least some degree. I also managed to obtain a PS5 last week so my attention this week never stood a chance. the most they'll get is a couple hours worth of on-boarding meetings outta me.

today, thanks to everyone else being tied up in meetings and forgetting to invite me to those meetings, i actually had a pretty zen day of refactoring and reviving old unit tests that no one ever seemed to know why they didn't work and so they were just skipped over.

really fucking hate those PM types who will hear a smart sounding term or buzzword used by a developer, and then proceed to overuse it (mostly incorrectly) in every fucking conversation as if it's le mot du jour.

or better yet, when the fucking parrot proceeds to drive a meeting with PO's by regurgitating verbatim your explanation you gave to him 2 hours before as if he knows that the fuck he's talking about. oh but when someone asks a question for clarification - "hey dev, you wanna take this one?"

hey PM, you wanna lick my balls?

for too many dumb reasons I really can't get into right now, LinqPad sure saved my ass today.

Just went through EOY reviews. I found out in my own review that someone made the questionable decision to give me a raise and a promotion I'm not sure if I deserve... however why I'm really stoked is because its the first time I've gotten to promote one of my juniors! Now *that* is a really rewarding feeling because the dude certainly went balls deep and earned it, and I have the power to validate that.

fuck iText.
fuck Aspose.
fuck Adobe.
fuck PDFs.

It will be all too soon if I never have anything to do with programming an app to do PDF generation/manipulation ever again.

hand-wrote me some gnarly-ass SQL today to resolve a prod "emergency". I was kinda proud that I did so and only had to google syntax once. Then my pride turned to shame when I realized what a spoiled little bitch LINQ has made of me.

Just moved this weekend into the first home I've ever actually owned. Bought a scotch older than myself to mark the occasion, but I want to save it to share with my brother sometime during Yule (that's an agonizing abstinence for me). But at least someone gifted me with a Macallan 12 yr for housewarming that has been hitting the spot quite nicely.

Got my PC set up already to unfortunately go back to work tomorrow. Speaking of which, is it like "Recruiting Season" or something? I have been hit up like crazy about other opportunities, at a time when my company that i've been with almost 4 years seems to be floundering to get its shit together.

I guess I haven't paid much attention in the past to whether I get hit up with "opportunities" more at the end of the year or not. But its something I'm seriously considering right now. 2020 was mostly stagnant for me, and ending the year with moving is a high note. Would not mind continuing this trend of change whilst I still have to wait for the world to be able to resume "normalcy" a while longer.

statics: just because you can, doesn't necessarily mean you should. now I get to spend my day cursing the guy who hired me 4 years ago, and who was fired 2 years ago, for his turrible design choices.

FreeBSD is so cheap, they can't even pay proper postage!