Can you pass me the salt? 😃

No shit. ✌🏼

1. The quality of the coffee and toilet paper you encounter during an interview tells you more than promises about table tennis or fruit baskets.

2. Try to determine who their primary client is: subscribers, app buyers, advertisers, etc. It's a major influence on the company dynamic.

3. Before an interview, you can just say: "I would like to sit down with a PO and run through one backlog feature and one bug, to get a feel for the type of tasks at the company". Such an activity immediately reveals team structure, whether they have product owners & scrum masters, what a sprint looks like, how they prioritize tasks, and how organized/chaotic your work experience will be.

Boss: "Could you join the new DevOps team for a week or two, for some coaching?"

Me: "I'd rather watch you masturbate furiously in a corner of the office while you cry over your ex boyfriend"

Boss: "Yeah... that's why I ask you. You are the only one brave enough to watch"

Me: *Sigh* "But I don't know shit about what DevOps does, I'm a DBA. I've told you the difference a million times. Can't we just douse it in gasoline and set it on fire?"

Boss: "What?"

Me: "Not the team, the servers..."

Boss, imitating Gimli: "And my ex!"

Me: "I get why he left you"

Boss: "It's funny, he was actually better with computers than me, maybe even better than you. He hated me for starting this company, told me I was just chasing money instead of ideals. He just isn't grown up enough to see that there is more to the world than computer games, brewing beer, maker festivals and gay bars, that you need to take responsibility... Maybe it just never works out between managers and geeks..."

Me: "Indeed. The difference in competence is too large"

Boss: "Ugh. You are like straight version of him... but will you at least take a look?"

Me: "Fine, unzip your pants..."

Boss: "No, not that... you need to teach DevOps this docking thing, with the parallel stuff, and the horizontal growth"

Me: "Damn I really hope we're talking about servers now... Do you mean Docker?"

Boss: "That's it. They want to learn how to dock on the Windows servers. They reserved two 4xlarge on AWS. Is that enough for docking?"

Me: ...

Me: ...

Me: "You know what. I'm going back to hug my DB designs, and wash my brain with some queries. Then I'll return here to burn everything to the ground. There is no hope for you left"

Boss: "That's what he said"

Me: "You're using that meme wrong"

Boss: "OK. So what if you just stay on DB management, and I'll just give you the budget to recruit a new DevOps lead and pay for training?"

Me: "That would work"

Boss: "Why are you grinning?"

Me: "Because I have your ex's phone number"

Production is down

Me to Customer :What did you do?
Customer: Nothing
Me blurt out: The fuck you didn't!
Customer: ...
Me: ...(fuckfuckfuck)
Customer:... Well, I did run these scripts..
Me: (oh thank Christ)
Me: ok, I'll get right on it (Click)
Me to TeamLead: client called. Their prod is down!
TeamMate: did he say he didn't do anything?
Me:Yes
TeamMate: ..... Every fucking time...

Staring at cursed blinking cursors.
Repairing work of worst thinking workers
Reverse merges or it'll murder the servers, it nurtures despair
Amateur managers, dimwitted savages interrupt all of us janitors
Cleaning up damages, spills and experiments using skills in embarrassment
Explicit foulness, in a minute it's straight to the bowels with weapons of limitless vowels
A bittersweet hateful machete, eviscerates stateful spaghetti
The slow disease flowing from keys knowing it's going to please
The growing unease, no one agrees, there's no guarantees with your useless degrees
Need more drugs, keyboard's crawling with bugs, falling as I chug
A bottle of cognac gotta love all the hacks, no poise for code that lacks
All the noise, gotta relax, before I destroy the syntax.

Excuse me for not making sense.
Too gloomy, aching and tense.

Sales employee Bob wants a clickable blue button.

Bob tells product owner Karen about his unstoppable desire for clickable blue buttons.

Karen assigns points for potential and impact (how much does a blue button improve Bob's life, how many people like Bob desire blue buttons)

Karen asks the button team how hard it is to build a button. The button team compares the request to a reference button they've built before, and gives an ease score, with higher score being easier (inverse of scrum points).

These three scores are combined to give a priority score. The global buttonbacklog is sorted by priority.

Once every two weeks (a "sprint") the button team convenes, uses the ease scores to assign scrum points. Difficult tasks are broken up into smaller tasks, because there is a scrum point upper limit. They use the average of the last 5 sprints to calculate each developer's "velocity".

The sprint is filled with tasks, from the top of the global button backlog, up to the team's capacity as determined by velocity. Approximate due dates are assigned, Bob is a happy Bob.

What if boss Peter runs into the office screaming "OUR IMPORTANT CLIENT WANTS A FUCKING PINK BUTTON WHICH MAKES HEARTS APPEAR"?

Devs tell boss to shut the fuck up and talk to Karen. Karen has a carefully curated list of button building tasks sorted by priority, can sedate boss with valium so he calms the fuck down until he can make a case for the impact and potential of his pink button.

Karen might agree that Peter's pink button gets a higher priority than Bob's blue button.

But devs are nocturnal creatures, easily disturbed when approached by humans, their natural rhythms thrown out of balance.

So the sprint is "locked", and Peter's pink button appears at the top of the global backlog, from where it flows into the next sprint.

On rare occasions a sprint is broken open, for example when Karen realizes that all of the end users will commit suicide if they don't have a pink heart-spawning button.

In such an event, Peter must make Bob happy (because Bob is crying that his blue button is delayed). And Peter must make the button team of devs happy.

This usually leads to a ritual involving chocolate or even hardware gift certificates to restore balance to the dev ecosystem.

A guide to estimations.

1) don’t give an immediate answer. The first “timeframe” you give will be held against you and will result in overtime and working weekends.

2) think of a relevant piece of work and the time that took.

2.1) if it’s something you haven’t done before, add some adequate research time.

3) allow half a day of testing for every day of development.

4) add a day as buffer - this is good for on the fly bug fixes

5) calculate time

6) now give an educated estimate.

7) this should take you 5 seconds to get through mentally.

8) if scope creep occurs: goto:1

Now, instead of shouting, I can just type "fuck"

The Fuck is a magnificent app that corrects errors in previous console commands.

inspired by a @liamosaur tweet
https://twitter.com/liamosaur/...

Some gems:

➜ apt-get install vim
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

➜ fuck
sudo apt-get install vim [enter/↑/↓/ctrl+c]
[sudo] password for nvbn:
Reading package lists... Done
...
➜ git push
fatal: The current branch master has no upstream branch.
To push the current branch and set the remote as upstream, use

git push --set-upstream origin master

➜ fuck
git push --set-upstream origin master [enter/↑/↓/ctrl+c]
Counting objects: 9, done.
...
➜ puthon
No command 'puthon' found, did you mean:
Command 'python' from package 'python-minimal' (main)
Command 'python' from package 'python3' (main)
zsh: command not found: puthon

➜ fuck
python [enter/↑/↓/ctrl+c]
Python 3.4.2 (default, Oct 8 2014, 13:08:17)
...
➜ git brnch
git: 'brnch' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

Did you mean this?
branch

➜ fuck
git branch [enter/↑/↓/ctrl+c]
* master
➜ lein rpl
'rpl' is not a task. See 'lein help'.

Did you mean this?
repl

➜ fuck
lein repl [enter/↑/↓/ctrl+c]
nREPL server started on port 54848 on host 127.0.0.1 - nrepl://127.0.0.1:54848
REPL-y 0.3.1
...

Get fuckked at
https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck

Asshole

I think it was on the final level of Doom.

ProTip: Use knife to save ammo in a paintball battle.

*at work* (fictional names)

Kevin (linux support engineer): Bob, could you come for a second to take a look at something?
Bob (senior linux engineer): *tiny voice from a corner behind a desk* bob is not available right now. Please try again later.
Kevin: Bob, please, just for a second!
Bob: bob is not available right now, please try again later.
Kevin: Boooooooooooooob, come heeeeereeeee
Bob: as said before, bob is not available right now, try again later.
Kevin: but booooooob, come oooooon.
Bob: it seems that you might have a hearing problem since bob is still not available.
Kevin: but booooohooooob, come heeeeeeeeeeereee
Bob: it seems like the person on the other side of this line might be retarded. Bob is not available right now.
Kevin: But boooohooooohooooooob come oooohooohooon, just for a seeehehecond *starts fake sobbing"
Bob: Bob is getting real tired of your shit. Leave bob alone.

😆

Good news: Learning to use Vim was tough as fuck but worth it. I've been on it for a week and not having to use a mouse for text editing anymore just naturally makes more sense.

Bad news: Nothing. Else. Has. Vim. I am going to be spending hours figruing out how to get this to work in MS Office online and Firefox to keep my workflow the same.

P.S. devRant should have a Vim option. Make it a perk for supporters. :)

The Pink Floyd have an album for all lol

My friend said "I googled it on duck duck go"

Me: Dude what?

Screaming at harddrives increases disk latency, as demonstrated in 2008 by a SUN-engineer.

https://web.archive.org/web/...

https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4

Secretary of the IT department stated in a meeting that she was "overqualified to babysit a group of 40 grown-ass men who are unable to communicate with each other"

... all devs had a huge grin on their faces because we knew that she was absolutely right, management was furious 😂

She submitted her resignation on the same day, best secretary we've ever had!

A call I had today, girl registered a domain and put it in her hosting package:

Girl: so where can I view my email accounts?
Me: *explains*
G: Oh, I wanted an email address with info or my first name as part before the @ but I only see an account with the name of my hosting account username?
Me: that's right, that's a default one you get :)
G: oh 😞 I....I.... I've always have wanted a domain name with my own email addresses linked to it and I thought I could do that this way 😩
(I could hear the disappointment and that she seemed very sad suddenly)
Me: do you see that "create new email account" button up there?
G: Yes..... Wait.... Can I make like multiple email addresses myself?!
Me: as many as you can manage inside your hosting account!
G: 😵😍 OH MY GOD
Me: Haha, enjoy creating some!
G: THANK YOU I LOVE YOU BYE
*Click*

It's those moments which can make your fucking day!

I've made a thing and I'm proud of it.:D

I need this mug in my life

Dear DEVS,

chmod -R 777 /

is not the right way to fix your application permissions issues!!!!!!

Yours truly,
sys ad who is not fixing your production server.

Loving i3 & vim for my dev enviroment

When I was an intern, I wrote a very heavy MySQL query with multiple joins. Quite frustrated, I asked for some help from one of my seniors.

He came by on my desk and told me, "Explain your query!".

I was completely blank-faced O_O.

After a few moments, the senior grabbed this hopeless bastard's keyboard and typed "EXPLAIN" in the beginning of the query; and then ran it.

I thought he was being hard to me.

Fucking drills.
I spent 1 hour to get in my zone and they have to do an unorganised unhelpful fire drill. Fucking timewaste. Why? 😫

I'm about to put an iframe in an Angular app that displays a Java applet. This isn't development, it's a suicide note

Make sure they have a proper understanding of forming questions for google / stack overflow :)

I introduced git with hope that our team gets better

I introduced trello in hope that our team get better

I introduced gitlab in hope our team gets better

I introduced scrum in hope our team gets better

I'm losing hope...

I AM FREE!!!!

I no longer work for that unappreciative, condescending, dolt driven company!

Time for bigger and better things!

My worst fear while being the on-call/standby server engineer is that I have to call another engineer awake at night because I can't figure something out 😅