How has your experience as a freelancer been? Ups, downs, etc.

boy running laps around garden

What is your method of dealing with states in state machines? In programming, we often come across situations where we have to model states in our head as to not get the programming wrong, e.g. in my case right now:

You have a tabular webform that gets filled in.
Requirements:
- When the user is able to search the data for a specific value, it should be a cumulative search (e.g.: search for books with "eng" in the language and then with with "19" in the publishing date)

And so the current pseudocode is:
search(e) {
if(!word) {
set(previousState);
}
const searchdata = previousState.filter((row) => row.indexOf(word) != -1);
// but wait, what if I say: searchdata = searchdata.filter() for cumulative search? Oops, I can't, because it doesn't exist at that moment yet. What if I create another variable?

setState(data: searchdata);
}

Current bug:
- when deleting characters from the search field, it doesn't filter cumulatively; it just filters the data according to the current filter.

It's things like these that get me stuck sometimes.

900 idle tabs on phone. Sync to laptop browser. Enormous file trees and indexing. 47 GB RAM used. I'm really pushing it. lmfao

!rant Writing code in a barebones text editor so that I am forced to think more about my code and debug deeper. Hah! No more fancy IDE's while learning (for now)!

The latest and greatest bullshit at the workplace: when you're asked to be an 'ambassador'. This really just translates to: 'take on more work for free'.

Whenever management approaches you with 'honorable extra role', immediately ask how it's compensated and definitely don't do it for no extra benefits (a raise should be default).

Don't fall into the trap.

Team 'leads' who consistently introduce scope creep are so fucking annoying. How can they get the basics of project management wrong? It leads to more, constant, work stress ("why didn't you finish this on time?" Well maybe because you keep reviewing PR's last minute and instead of sticking to requirements, you ad-hoc make me 'fix' things that weren't even there).

Apparently all companies are now a 'cutting-edge, digital transformation partner'. lmao. lol.

!rant https://www.imgopt.com/ (known as smush.it!) is the online image optimization tool of choice.

I came across it when reading one of my React books. I hope it proves useful to people.

You know what I find truly despicable? Consultants who grossly over-sell worthless digital products.

Take a guy who throws together 2 text boxes and a list in Figma and calls it: "The disruptive platform that will solve all your problems at once today!". Are you fucking kidding me? Such an insult to people's intelligence.

There is a saying: "A salesman will sell you a dirty cloth for the price of a house".

The average meeting: "I think that's a really great idea. Let's circle back on this and take a 60k view, leveraging the low-hanging fruit so we can identify you championed this technology".

Seriously? Championed? As if the other bs language weren't enough. And this is language that they use to convince clients. "My consultant championed A.I.". Are you fucking kidding me? It sounds ridiculous. Needless to say, we lost that client.

Shitty jobs and not staying up to date make you stale. Probably having to find a new job, my skills are barely updated and now I find myself in a shitty situation. Going to have to do my best now.

Don't let a demanding, shitty job cause you to stay behind! I can't stress it enough. Dev skills are transferrable, employer dev skills mostly aren't, especially if you are tied to their brand.

This is the nth software company where you have some asshole who for some reason (probably because they hate you) plays blame-games when it comes to code reviews, when they themselves screwed up in the first place (I know there's git blame, but..).

The guy writes shitty code quickly because the manager asked, then I take my time and patience to make it better, and in the code review they shit on me for things THEY wrote badly? Wtf man. What kind of logic is that? Fucked up people. And then putting shit in bold and exclamation marks (wtf?).

Is it just me or have you also seen this behavior with your colleagues?

Putting people on too many projects (6 projects) is bad because when it comes to reviewing your work (let's say 30 x 200 lines of code), they will spend 5 minutes on it, 10 tops, give a shitty, lazy review and then they get back to their projects.

This is just pure mismanagement. You're stressing your employees to get everything done, the 'quality' is then spread so thin everything turns to shit.

Has anyone you know used A.I. at work to write an e-mail for them? It's ridiculous.

Instead of boring HTTP error pages, some APIs now return a meme image. Wtf lol.

What modern software development feels like:

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

They want perfect quality, perfect speed, no errors whatsoever, no bugs, all the while bothering us.

WAV is Mr. Bloat. Extract WAV 48 KHz from an mp4 video = 6 GB .wav file output.

More efficient is to just use ffmpeg. lmao. Result: 1:1, 500 MB. Couldn't be more efficient!
ffmpeg -i file.mp4 -vn -acodec mp3 output.mp3

Have you ever situationally bought a tech book at work only to not use it afterwards because the situation became no longer applicable?

Want to know a sad story? I had a great idea for an internal application that would optimize a process in the company. My idea gets approved and.. guess what? Later it gets cancelled because Change Management didn't see a reason for me to get API rights on the company pipeline, which was what I needed to get my application going. I pitch my idea and they don't care and shut me down quickly because it's just another ticket they want to close asap.

Another guy in my company, openly incompetent but big buddies with the higher-ups gets his idea approved without effort. They open the doors for him and talk to Change Management to get him in. Then he's seen as Mr. Big Ideas while this guy doesn't even know how to use a terminal (I'm not joking). Even the girls admire him but he's a complete idiot who just smiles a lot.

It's whom you know, apparently. And bureaucracy is a piece of shit. So are cronyism and corruption.

Consulting.

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

Wtf is up with some education providers? Even the de facto industry leaders have half-assed courses. Not many are super high quality. They sound like they are speaking into a mic, forced to do it. Nothing like YouTube, more like middle-aged, depressed men with no life with no energy. I'd much rather learn elsewhere. This is akin to how some university professors give some lectures. Where are the passionate teachers of our world?

The ones that I enjoyed were: MIT, Harvard and Stanford. Perhaps it has to do with money. lol.

It would be nice and more community spirit if people on YouTube would:

- stop using A.I. for voice-over
- stop using A.I. for random comments
- stop using A.I. for video content

It's beginning to become confusing what's real and what's not. I admire real creators, not quick-buck fakers.

Sweet vermouth, rocks, with a twist, please. Mine,.. too! Rome's my favorite too, the way the sun, hits the water, on the boats...

To the groundhog!

Work just keeps surprising me and giving me wtf moments. They want me to finish a course in 1/10th of the time that the industry recommends just because they don't have budget for more time. I'm quite pissed off. Now I have to work 700% faster. Let's do this shit. lol

Okay, suppose the following: You are hired at a company as a Software Developer and Computer Science is something you want to evolve in, and you chose a branch to deepen your expertise in.

A few years pass and it's always been company interests first. A few colleagues suffer the same but they don't stay long; they see that they are being duped, their passions and goals not respected and the company puts itself and its interests in the first place, and they quickly leave the company.

You decide that after these years of putting the company first, it's time to put yourself first. Yet, the company, with a 'friendly' nudge, hints strongly that it's company interests (i.e. money) first, and you find yourself getting pushed away farther and farther from your passions you wanted to deepen into, now getting assigned to polar opposite roles (e.g. SysAdmin).

What would you do in this case? I'd logically think: keep evolving on your personal time, use the years of experience and the exposure to tech and meanwhile plan to get out asap.

Have you ever proposed great ideas to the company, yet they were rejected time after time, only for some half-assed golden favorite boy to steal the show for you with their half-assed idea?

I mean, now I understand that once you've been long enough in the industry, you express a deep, long sigh at least once a day. Plus, it affects your mental health. Not giving a fuck and just working on yourself more and your personal projects is crucial.

Idealistic vs. realistic sprint planning:

Idealistic:
p1: "Can you tell us why you think this user story deserves 9 workdays?"
p2: "Of course. We are using framework xyz for part ABC of component y, so if we were to adopt changes in this, we would need to do new test planning and adjust accordingly. The complexity is of linear time and so -"
p1: "Interesting. I had not thought about that. Let us discuss more"

Realistic:
p1: "Ok so, how long?"
p2: "um, 9 days"
p1: "k"
p2: "k"
p1: "and you?"
p2: "yeah 4 for this 2 for this 1 for this, rest is ok"
p1: "aight, meeting concluded gg"

The idealistic one can happen if there's team trust, but usually there's team dysfunction which causes for team silence and brewing of product issues later on. If only reality weren't this sad.

What a big surprise that developers have burnout. It used to be that working code that was halfway decent was good enough, and now the industry demands of you that you produce Martin Flower/Google engineer-level clean code at the high speed of a senior dev with thirty years of experience. And this is not a joke, it's the norm. I've been asked to meet this norm and sustain it. What a piss-off. How is anyone supposed to keep up with this pace?

I'm sick and tired of nepotism and cronyism at work.

I just had to get this out of my system because it's broodingly pissing me off.