Just remembered the time I was scheduled for a job interview after my 9 hour work day. They surprised me with a 45 minute MySQL exam. Nothing in the exam was relevant to the job requirements but even if it would have been, my brain was already fried for the day.

I wrote my first line of code at 12. I fell in love with it and continued. I'm 25 now and I'm a software engineer. I don't even have time or energy to work on personal projects anymore. Writing code isn't a hobby anymore. It's a means to survive. Why/how did this happen? When will building things be fun again? Before landing my first job as an engineer, not once did I consider salaries, equity, atmosphere, nor any of the other amenities (or lack thereof) of code as a profession. But, I don't even know when any of that fell into the picture and they've managed to suck the novelty out of a really cool pastime. I'm essentially a well-paid robot. Who did this? What's happening? What can I do to find the freedom I once had? When did I become just another cog in a machine? Should I try my hand in business, bent on making a lot of money so I can retire early and have time to experiment again? Is that unrealistic? Should I buy lottery tickets every paycheck? We only get one life and I realized this. I'm panicking because I know I'm not enjoying myself and that I'm not on track to leave the world better than it was when I was born into it. So much loss. I'm grateful, but this is not cool at all. I want my hobby back.

All too often.

When somebody else in the office steals your rant, puts it up on devRant and gets more +1's than anybody else on devRant.

when the project manger asks for status on a ticket.
me: what ticket
pm: hold on. (makes ticket). that one.

when I finally get my code to work, no matter how small, I get up and walk around feeling like a boss

Clients having conversations in their own head then claiming you were there when they said (imagined) it.

When your daily scrum takes an hour because your senior developer co-worker gives unnecessary and incredibly detailed updates...

"Well, first I tried hiding the button, but it wouldn't come up when I needed it to, so then I made an options menu, but the sliding transition was difficult to implement, so then I..."

Just learned the previous dev team thought a db column with a value of NULL or "Y" was a great way to handle boolean values.

Boss: Can you refactor some of the code [dev who recently quit] wrote? Y'know, improve the readability a little bit.

Me: Sure thing. *opens project*

Project: *has 76 variables named var2 through var78*

Me: why are you using so many break tags?

Intern: Its the only way I can position this div below that form.

Me: *facepalm*

- The webpage is wrong-
My worst fears come to me.
- How is that? -
- Texts are not justified -

When you read those job ads "Must be able to work well under pressure and to tight deadlines in a busy office etc.."
Who would willingly walk in to such a shitty role. Perhaps if they fired the management things would improve.

- The PDF you are sending is wrong - said the boss.
- Why? -
- Client says that it is not complete. -
I check the pdf, nothing missing.
- I don't understand -
- The client only sees a part of it, this corner -
- Client should zoom out pdf reader -

"Changed HTML" has got to be the best commit message ever... Especially when the commit is mostly .cs files.

So last night i was dealing with some mysql query issues trying to grab some complex data from a relational database and ended up giving up.

This afternoon i was about half-asleep going to nap, not even thinking about the code and randomly came up with the solution.

A few hours later i made the changes and it works as intended.

Anyone else solve code subconsciously ? 😂😂😁😁

Friend: You're good with computers right?
Me: well...yeah why?
Friend: can you have a look at my microwave? something's wrong with it...
Me: ::face palm::

Fighting the urge to type "clear" command during text conversations or IM.