Question for leads...
Have you found that it's possible to have a balanced leadership style instead of ruling with an iron fist?

Let me explain what I mean.

There's always going to be room for improvement, there's going to be at least the occasional issue that happens, etc.
As a lead, your job is to not have issues happen and to have the team work effectively.

Now, for me, my goal was to have a balanced style in the sense that if there's a small issue or small room for improvement, but the team is already stressed, I take the heat for it if necessary and let them relax so they're not stressed and they can focus on the bigger things.
For medium improvements, I essentially put it to the vote so the team can have their say in whether they agree with the proposal on improvement.
And so on, idea being to have a balance between "Do what I tell you" and "do whatever you want".

However, I have found that doing so does essentially nothing to improve team morale and team cohesion. Any thing that needs doing and I force them into it, any thing I don't protect them from, any thing they don't agree with will still manifest as problems in the team, a single "you have to do this" will make them complain about the leadership style being "force to implement".

Being completely hands off and essentially not a lead, just basically a support dev more or less, is not what I'm really looking for, but also isn't good for a team that does genuinely have things that need to improve (stupid errors not being caught in dev OR review, system not being fully testable because of external dependencies that are not really necessary for tests, etc).

So the only option I see there is simply ruling with an iron fist and leaning into being that hated lead that just forcea you to do things and "doesn't care about you".
I've already stepped down from this lead position because I don't want to be that guy, but if I'm looking for another position I'm curious if this is just universal or hae you guys found that it IS possible to have a "good team" where you can be adults and discuss things as a team and improve as a team?

So someone from another team in the company asked on our public Slack channel if they can send a field they're sending for one client, for all clients, so they don't have to have a branch for that one client that sends it.
We're talking about a string of up to 20 chars, typically much less even connected to each record, of which we have let's say a million per month and each of those records has at least 30 columns, some of them being longer strings even.

A dev from my team responded that they shouldn't send it because, while no one uses it so it's not going to break anything, it will require extra storage.

This was not 20 years ago, this was today, in 2021.

I responded asking what storage does he foresee to be the problem, because I can't see where so I'd like to get more details.

Guess who got ripped to shreds because it's a bad thing to question members of the team in public....

This is just one in a long line of similar brainless idiocies I've had to deal with from this asshole.

And no, I'm not a junior dev or something, I'm transitioning out of the Principal Engineer role for that team (for this reason exactly, otherwise I'd stay as PE). And no, I'm not the transitioning the role to that asshole.

At least 3 people who have left the team because of this asshole.

Managers not helping either, responses like "Yeah, you're right, but you're reasonable, he isn't, so let's appease him until we can find a way to deal with him"...

I used to love being a developer, this asshole made me want to vomit at any mention of anything remotely dev related...

Hope y'all are reasonably happy with your jobs and, more importantly, don't have such an asshole around you!

When you're having such a shitty day that you're investigating why something is (obviously) wrong and after ages you find a bug that you just don't even want to admit you made, but then you realise that, even though that's there and would fit the weird behaviour, you realise there's actually a safeguard that, while it doesn't correct for the issue properly, it at least prevents the whole thing from going apeshit...

Oh gods please show me why this is behaving so wrong even though the massive bug is kind of cancelled out....

Just got a message from a co-worker out of the blue telling me he loves my code.
Happiest day of my life :D

Means more to me than any other achievement in my life.

I just fucking rage quit SSMS...
Was trying to call a long named stored procedure and started typing the name when suddenly, autocomplete pops up with the name of the procedure.
I'm like hell yeah, I press tab to complete it, it appends the name to what I already wrote...
I delete it, start writing again, pops up again, I press down to select it and press enter, it appends it again.
*Ragequit*
Who the fuck QA'd that?

I went to bed and before sleeping opened an app on my phone that controls the music on my PC.
At first glance it looked like something was different so my first thought was "Ooh, they updated the app" and then I remembered that no, I didn't. I'm a lazy sack of crap that didn't update that app in a while and I didn't even implement everything.

On the plus side, I did actually get the basics working so... :D

I was 7 years old and my father bought our first PC, something like a 286, 386 or possibly even a 486, don't remember... Anyway, the guy that was setting it up was a programmer and I watched him first set it up and then I watched him program something into the wee hours on our new PC, I've no idea what he was doing, but I watched him for hours, was dazzled by it as much as by the games he installed :)

I hate the Windows vs Linux posts and the Windows sucks posts but god dammit...
With Windows 7 becoming older and older with less and less things supporting it (latest thing is the new Oculus Dash) I yet again decided to try out Windows 10 to see if I should finally upgrade from a reasonably stable system.

So I make a virtual machine out of my physical one and boot it up in VMWare... I upgrade to Windows 10 to check it out it's kind of janky, but I attribute the jankiness to the messiness of running my physical machine in a VM... I continue with the setup process and suddenly, I only see a black screen and a cursor...
I notice VMware is hinting at not being able to connect to the monitor... I realise that, while everything is black and I can't even open Task Manager, I can still see the Ctrl-alt-delete screen so I'm fairly certain at this point it's the VGA driver, still thinking it's probably VMware...

I boot up into safe mode and I try to open up Device manager to uninstall the driver, it won't open (no error or anything, just doesn't open)...

I try opening up devices in the settings and see that the display device is giving an error, try to uninstall it from there, but it freezes the settings app, every time..

I try to uninstall VMware tools as that's where the driver is, click on remove or uninstall whatever the button says and guess what, it freezes the settings app....

I try to open task manager to kill it and task manager is not responding...
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
fuck it, I'm done...

Magic!

Got an email today from a random person asking for help on using a thing I have in GitHub. Even though it's not at all a big deal, made me feel so proud :)

On the other hand, every day I work on software responsible for thousands of people a day (not a big deal, but still something that affects thousands per day) and I feel meh about that...

Brains are weird :)

Come into work after a 3-day weekend, see a file isn't saved, think it's probably just a random space or something I accidentally added after modifying the crap out of the file and saved for the weekend so I compare the file from the disk to the file in memory. Turns out, I didn't save a single time since I started working on it.
I guess Friday me likes to live dangerously.

Gotta love git. Every time I look for something I don't know I learn about some new fun command like
git update-index --really-refresh

And yes, there's a regular refresh command as well :)

So... Three of us have the task to do security reviews for one team... As to who reviews what, we decided on the basic algo of assigning an index to our names and then doing (ticket number) % 3 to get the index and therefore the reviewer for that task... Simple enough, but still you need to modulo the number and remember your index so I created a simple .html file so we can easily see who reviews which ticket by inputting the ticket number... In a hurry I named it whoreview.html
Today, the manager saw it and said to rename it before HR gets involved :D

My god Microsoft, reboot for updating Visual Studio? Seriously? Wtf?

Spent a few hours optimising a procedure...
It's almost quitting time now, my procedure is returning wrong results in more time...
I hate "productivity" on Friday...

Why SQL, why???
I have a proc I need to modify so I add a select into it. Drop the proc and recreate it, run it, new select not giving results.
Modify the select to inverse filter to see what I do have, recreate the proc, run it, still no results...
Run four different cache cleaning queries, still no results from the new select...
Add a "select 1" before the new select, recreate and run the proc and now I have the new 1 and also the other select now has results...
Change the filters back, still getting same results...
Remove the select 1, no results...
What kind of devil cache is this?

Exported my first cutscene into a video from Unreal Engine, I'm unrealistically happy :D
It's just following a course, doing pretty much the same things and it's not nearly perfect, but it's still a nice apartment display with a good amount of details so I'm still proud of myself :)

So here I am investigating something our users are claiming. I look up which user the UserId did the change and I see not only the user but also the users password in clear text in a separate field. I thought that field was for a password hint that the user can set up, but I asked around and apparently, no... It's literally the plain text version of the password stored in the database, next to the hash of the password.
Apparently, the users were so impossible to deal with that we added that column and for users that constantly pester us about not knowing their password and not wanting to change it, we added a plaintext password field for them :D

I'm doing a code review and, it's not unheard of to have lowercase SQL im our codebase even though most of it is uppercase. For this reason I decided to let the lowercase SQL slide even though it makes me cringe so much... That is, until I came to one procedure that was uppercase and in this revision it is lowercase :O I want to die a gruesome way which would be very nice compared to this :O

Life :)

But seriously, there's sooooo many side projects I'd really like to start/finish I can't even list them...

So I'm wondering how I'm getting a date that, according to the settings should not be that one in that case, but is pretty fucking close (so much so that I first thought that was the correct one).
Then I realise it's because I'm hitting a case where I can't get all the necessary info so I literally made a method called GuessDate and it tries to guess the date based on available info and it did an amazing job, but it didn't have all the data so it's slightly off.
I both love and hate programming right now :)

Well I just did a SELECT CUNT from a table...
Not sure what to think about that :)

To the person who added NULLIF function to MSSQL I say I hope rabid ferrets bite your balls off.
That is all.

You know what I really like? When apps override the scrolling behaviour...
Yes, I really want you to disable my scrolling settings and enforce your own goddamn scrolling logic, it's so great to have shit I'm used to being forcibly removed from me.
Biggest surprise is the latest place I've seen this is Unreal Engine :O Scrolling the news in the launcher is slow as fuck.

So Nvidia doesn't let you use their GeForce Experience app anymore without logging in.
*Uninstalled*
Fuck that, I don't want to login so I can see an FPS counter in my ganes or record them to my local disk or something like that... Fuck you Nvidia and fuck whoever decided that would be a good idea.

Started my first experience with Udemy yesterday. The video seems to be buffering occasionally and switching to low quality frequently which makes it hard to read what's on the screen. I'm not happy about that the least bit. Is that normal for Udemy?
Also, I bought a course for €10 that was supposedly discounted from something like €200. I assume this is a marketing trick? Do all courses always have those kinds of "discounts"?

Way back in high school there was a school wide competition to see who would represent the school at the bigger competition (I dunno, regional or something). Halfway during the test I was on the third out of four tasks while pretty much everyone else was on the first one. The teacher saw this, looked at what I did and said to everyone "He is already on task 3, does everyone agree he represents the school?"
Everybody said yes immediately.
:) The dev equivalent of a K.O. win, felt pretty badass :D

I think I would love to switch to a tools developer in the gaming industry.
Anybody else like that particular area?
Anybody employed in that particular area?

I've read that tools developers are regarded as lesser developers for some reason. Any thoughts?

I think this might be a record...
My sister asks me what's this, I come over, she shows me a random website she found and starts asking me what she can do on that website...
Fucking kill me now...

I feel like saying "I know C#" (or Java or other similar languages) to mean that you know it as a language as opposed to more of a framework is ridiculous. We should say what programming language level we know (high, mid, low...) since the difference between say C# and Java is pretty much the same as the difference between say WinForms and WPF. Depending on which two languages and which two frameworks you choose it can be a much bigger difference between the frameworks than the languages.
In a CV I'd like to say "I know x-level languages with experience in [actual programming language + frameworks]" instead of saying I know C# and then recruiters and HR people and such assume I don't know Java at all, but know MVC, WebForms and whatever else even though I might specialise in something else and would take me pretty much the same to get proficient in Java as it would take me to get proficient in that framework or something that's technically C#.
It just makes so much more sense to me. As a dev you're supposed to know the principles, the syntax should be secondary. A pointer is a pointer regardless of it's marked with a * or IntPtr or just a value in a register with no special marking that it's a pointer...
Can we, as devs, come up with something like this?