I’m finishing up a thing for someone. It’ll be in prod soon. I’m nervous. I keep picking at it but it’s “done.” It’s just a silly script. But I haven’t written anything in a long time that someone else is gonna actually use. I write things no one else uses to make my life easier.

LinuxAcademy - is it worth the expense? Does anyone have a resource suggestion that costs less or free or has better material?

I’ve been dealing with low motivation for a few weeks now. Usually, I would take a break or build something fun, but I’m not even motivated for those things lately. Looking forward to everyone’s coping mechanisms for ideas.

In a meeting, we made some pretty major adjustments to a dev server. We broke it. Under pressure, I cracked and I randomly forgot the syntax for a sql update statement that might’ve at least got it back semi-online. To be fair, it’s been several years since I’ve needed any sql. Thank goodness I grabbed a snapshot as soon as I realized things were about to get edited. Saved. 😁

Any Oracle DBAs here?

Spent half the day trying to make something work. It wasn’t working before I started and I wasn’t making any progress. I don’t know why my changes weren’t working. So I yanked out everything I changed and put it back the way it was before I started. It works now. I don’t know why it works. I give up. 😂

I am the new girl. While I’ve been at this company for two years, I’ve only been in my new position a little over a month. I haven’t quite figured out if I am sysadmin or devops yet. It’s a bit all over the place. I am building a new thing at work. I build different types servers and set them on fire frequently as a hobby. This one is a stack I haven’t built before. It wasn’t working. I eventually got to the point where I told the other guy maybe I should consider resigning, I’m not qualified for this job. He said... Finally... now you’re going to figure it out and fix it. The next day, I did find what I kept overlooking and made it work. I guess this is life now.

I hope I’m not the only person who drafts a plan to build a thing to do a thing, and in the course of research about implementing the thing, winds up mashing together several other unrelated things because they looked like fun and the original thing gets left behind. (Oh, look, squirrel!)

1) Reader Rabbit on an Apple IIGS in the late 80s. I might've been in Kindergarten. Found the boxes stored in an unreachable storage area at my dad's house recently. Knowing how he took care of things, it probably still works. He won't let me touch it.

2) Fast forward to early middle school, Ultima VII on an NEC desktop, 90s. That game was great but also a pain in the ass. Had to make a startup floppy disk to help with memory allocation and something else. Learned DOS things. For some reason the disk wouldn't work from one day to the next so would have to reconfigure it frequently. Also learned the hard way not to fork too much with autoexec.bat during this period.

Anyone familiar with codewars or codingame? Know of an iOS app for similar? I like to work through short exercises when I have a few minutes to burn and the sites aren't exactly pretty on mobile.

Looking for "real reviews" of Udemy courses.

Who here have taken a Udemy course?

Which course did you take?

What was your opinion of it, in terms of overall quality, material coverage, interactivity (the coursework), and so forth?

Did you feel you actually learned useful things at the conclusion of it?

Had you taken a similar course through a different service? Which service and how did it compare?

There are some $10 courses at Udemy I'm considering purchasing. But there are two $100/each courses I'm highly interested in. TMI: We are a single income, single parent household of 3 with Christmas nearing and all the childrens have birthdays this month. Spring Break was apparently a very busy time for the adults of our extended family. Hence, even the $10 is hard to part with.

At work one morning, I was asked in chat for a way to edit an xml file on a Mac. They couldn't open it due to permissions. I told them to open Terminal and run sudo vi /path/to/file.xml. Never got a message back about it, so I assumed everything was OK. Later that afternoon, I received another question: "I'm in, I've made the changes, now what? How do I get out?" It wasn't funny until I realized how many memes existed for this. I'd imagined they'd quickly opened and edited it and spent hours unable to exit it; though, realistically, it probably wasn't attempted until the afternoon. Truthfully, I was new to it, too, and have no idea why I suggested vi over something else.

Any ServiceNow developers in this thing? Besides the training and learning plans on developer.servicenow.com and their API documentation, any other recommendations for resources (books, videos, courses)? I didn't find any at Lynda, and those I've found on YouTube are fairly poor quality. I like books more than videos in general although sometimes it's nice to hear someone talk through it. I found a course at Udemy, but I'm a bit leery of its quality. I have been toying around in a developers' instance and once I get a better feel of it, I plan to replicate an implementation of it that I already used as a technician, and improve upon it. The platform is way more massive than I already thought it would be.

I once had a user email the help desk, explaining in a rather twisted and confusing way his issue. He signed the end of it with "shibboleet" (xkcd reference). I called him, because there was no way I'd be able to go over it through email, and for nearly an hour we totally nerded out over it together, working through it. At the end of our conversation, he said he couldn't believe the shibboleet thing was real! I confessed that I was first level and he'd happened to have asked about a thing that was of personal interest and hobby of mine... and catching the reference was the icing, that I wanted to play along.

I hate "giving away" my tickets. It's easier when it's involving something I just don't have access to, but really, really hard to escalate a ticket that I feel like I should know better how to work.

The meme I saw here before... changing stuff and seeing what happens... with a side of documentation.

Remote IT work. I had a caller immediately berate and try to insult me because she recognized my very Southern accent wasn't local and I wasn't onsite. They tried to insinuate I wouldn't know what they were talking about with "do you even know what [x] is?" Calmly, I said yes ma'am. This is before she ever got to what her issue was. It was command line things I needed to run to fix it, but she wouldn't stop talking. "Are you even trying to help me or do anything? You must not know what you're doing." I'm a terrible multitasker so I end up sometimes typing what I hear, saying what I read, or zoning out of everything to accomplish a particular thing. So it took me a minute or two longer than normal. But that call wasn't what pissed me off. It was the complete 180 she turned when she emailed in when I resolved the ticket, praising me for how knowledgeable and professional I was, that I almost considered it all a troll.

I don't have very many high emotion stories and neither is this one. I'm pretty laid back, go with it, person.

Side project I wish I could finish... updating my resume and building a portfolio so I can get a new job.

At my first job, I was in test automation. For a major new complicated feature, I was the test lead and its final stages coincided with a company trip to Israel. I got to sit side by side with its lead developer and he went over all his code and database changes with me. He kept stopping because I guess I had that deer in headlights expression and he thought he was boring me. Actually I was just in awe. He was so proud of his work on it and had every right to be. It was so cool of him to take an hour or two and break it down for me like that.

He told me he wanted to make sure I understood all the pieces involved so I could test more and he could release a rock solid new feature.

Once upon a time, received a call whose intro was "I have a new production machine and I want to set up the Exchange server."

Person wanted to set up Outlook on a new personal computer.

Terminology can be dangerous.

Dev badass moments: every time that lightbulb moment hits when building or debugging difficult things.

After a not-so-great week last week, look what magically appeared to wish me a better week this week. 😊 Saving these for a new machine I plan on ordering soon. Thanks!

My first testing job in the industry. Quite the rollercoaster.

I had found this neat little online service with a community. I signed up an account and participated. I sent in a lot of bug reports. One of the community supervisors sent me a message that most things in FogBugz had my username all over it.

After a year, I got cocky and decided to try SQL injection. In a production environment. What can I say. I was young, not bright, and overly curious. Never malicious, never damaged data or exposed sensitive data or bork services.

I reported it.

Not long after, I got phone calls. I was pretty sure I was getting charged with something.

I was offered a job.

Three months into the job, they asked if I wanted to do Python and work with the automators. I said I don't know what that is but sure.

They hired me a private instructor for a week to learn the basics, then flew me to the other side of the world for two weeks to work directly with the automation team to learn how they do it.

It was a pretty exciting era in my life and my dream job.

Eliminating distractions and interruptions. When focused and in the zone, even a "quick question" breaks my concentration enough that it becomes frustrating to get back into my train of thought.

I am also known around the office to stare you dead in the eye while you're talking to me and I'm still typing... and not hear a damn word you said.

Managers at my jobs for the most part leave me be. Though I often have no clue whether I'm doing OK. I guess no news is good news right?

My worst experience isn't that bad. At one place, I was the only tester working on things coming from 20-30 devs. After about a year+, the company finally hired more testers, but it was still only 3 of us.

We were in the final stages of releasing a build to prod. It was going smoothly, or so we thought. At the last minute, I found a buried bug that was a showstopper.

A lot of hatred on me that day, that once it was fixed, and the release was finally deployed, I just shut off my laptop and left. I took all the blame because I was the one who found it rather than blaming the team as a whole for not finding it earlier. Oh well. Stuff happens.

Let's knock on wood that I don't run into worse higher up stories.

I'm typically very humble about my work. There's a certain project that I enjoy a lot. It is challenging to me, which is something important to me. I learn a lot.

Colleagues do not enjoy the project in the way that I do. In fact, most of them don't like it or try to avoid when they can. When they can't, they often consult with me about the project. I have a genuine curiosity and interest in it.

However, there is one aspect of it that I don't like at all, but I deal with it. It comes with the territory, I guess. What IS discouraging and turns me away from it though, is when colleagues "get the better end of the deal" when it comes to making special arrangements for this project. Sure, make me dedicated to it for a period of time so that I stay focused on the topic, but yet, kind of do the same for another team member but reward the other person with not having to also deal with the particular task I don't enjoy. Give them the pieces I enjoy and stick me on the pieces I don't.

I know this is a very general post and it probably makes no sense, but I needed to let off some steam and still keep it somewhat anonymous. I work hard for this project and I often don't take credit when it's given to me / when I should be taking it. It's just discouraging how things are arranged sometimes.

One that understands one's need for distraction-free work area in exchange for producing quality. Also, encourages research, uptraining, and learning.

When your boss schedules you for training all week, then asks you why you're in training and gets onto you for not doing your normal tasks... ??? I don't know what I'm doing...!

Not specifically dev, but somewhat related. Of all the ticketing systems I weave my way in and out of on a daily basis depending on which hat I'm wearing at the time, FootPrints is absolutely the bane of my entire existence.

Yea... it's not at all obvious I have my nose buried in a book and constantly tapping at the keyboard to run tests for how I might work out this problem. Now is an excellent time to repeat my name over and over, since I've been trying to ignore it, until I look up at you, just so you can show me that hilarious giphy thingy you found.