Recently I am interested a lot into neuroscience or more specifically brain computer interfaces (BCI) and thinking about making some nice mind controllable project.

Anyway, I actually feel like an asshole, because a lot of scientists work hard to make a life easier for disabled people, and then here I am getting all excited about technology to make life easier for myself.

Still, drone controlled just by brain activity sounds so fucking amazing!

My first contractor company 3 years ago, I was only junior with 3 other senior devs. I was assigned a project implemented by other company. So I am reading code and it’s total mess and then I find comment in controller that says “// some magic here, don’t touch it”, turns out that piece of code was added by our lead developer.

What the fuck firefox?

- homepage and new windows: blank page
- new tabs: blank page
- default and the only enabled search engine: duckduckgo

So why the fuck, when I go to homepage I get redirected to fucking google?

Having a call with recruiter (Netherlands) in English:

* he’s late 10mins
- ...
- Now I will ask you some questions, please answer shortly as possible, so it will be easier for me
- Okay
...
- what salary would you like to get in your new job?
- I am thinking about 3000eur
- you mean before taxes?
- no, I mean netto, I want to get that amount already after taxes.
- wow! That’s quite a lot
- well, average in the Netherlands
- definitely no. Where have you learnt that?
- just google
- I don’t believe you, for your age, with that experience for mid-level full- stack php developer - that can’t be true, especially if you don’t speak dutch...
...
- describe yourself in 3 words
- ...confident
- oh, I can see that you’re confident, because of how much salary you want
...
- so you are looking for a new job?
- *in my mind: no motherfucker, I am just having this conversation for no fucking reason...* yes
- ...
- so company I am working with, they working with very complex systems and there’s no much developers that fit their requirements - literally reads everything from job posting - you need to know php, symfony, laravel, have a good agile understanding, be able to work with complex systems...
...

Just to make it clear: I am 22, have 4 years exp, and working with php, javascript, symfony, laravel, reactjs... 36k/y seems ok to me. So either I am wrong and should leave Netherlands, because I can get same amount in my home country and also pay less for rent or this motherfucker is just super dumb.

Fuck that piece of shit typescript!!!

Ever since I picked it up I have more problems with it, than it actually solves...

1. So you want to use that 3rd party library? No problem, just use typescript special import syntax.
- yeah, I do, it doesn’t work that way, but works with es6 import even if you fucking show me that damn error.

2. Want to use map? No problem, we have an interface for it and you treat it as an object.
- oh yeah? And how about fucking more user friendly approach: {key: value}? Why the fuck do I need to create a fucking instance and then use a fucking set method for each value?

3. Want to access value from native dom element? Sorry, but you need to define type yourself.
- fuck you

So, one of npm packages event-stream (from flatmap-stream dep) has been found having a malware that steals bitcoins.

Source: https://dev.to/ben/...

My colleagues scanned their projects and found they are actually using those dependencies. I advice you to do the same, because let’s be honest, you guys don’t even know what you have inside your node_modules.

So, like a month ago boss told our team that they want to start new branch in company for working with sitecore and hire new developer for it. We agreed with condition that we won’t need to do anything. During today’s meeting they told that everyone in company will need to become certified in sitecore in order for company become certified.

Well, it doesn’t seem like anyone is happy with it. Especially me, I got angry and told them I am not going to do it and that’s not what I am hired for. Well, they say that they pay me money and I will need to do it anyway... of course it’s in working hours, so they have a point.

Also, I mentioned in my previous rants, that I was having some job interviews with other companies and also I let my employers know about it. They were okay with first one, when I told about the second interview, they got angry on me, that I haven’t asked for a raise or discussed conditions... But thing is they haven’t even tried negotiate/counter offer.

After those interviews, I thought I am going to stay in this company a few months more and then I will start looking for a job. But after today, I am not that sure.

Of course, it’s nothing for me to get certification, but it’s just the fact that they didn’t ask us, they decided on their own and now want to force us to get it.

What do you think?

So I work at small digital agency where I am the only backend dev (besides 3 front end devs), usually working on small scale projects (in 1,5years finished 8 projects). While I enjoy the job and time by time get to learn new stuff, I feel like I am overqualified and would like to work with some big data and high traffic where I would really could challenge myself. Now I just over engineer (architecture design, performance, security, test) projects and take 2 months, where it could be finished in 1.

So over last 2 weeks I had two job interviews which I failed (I am not sure about second, but it feels like it). It’s either because I am socially awkward or don’t know algorithms well enough.

Anyway, I am planning to extend contract with my current company for 6 more months, and over that period during free time focus on improving my skills.

In fact, I have an idea to create simple multiplayer game implementing my own server in go, basically type of project where high scalability matters, and could practice a lot of new concepts like concurrency.

If I can’t get into position of such environment, then I just going to create it myself. And if I get lucky I even could earn some money from it.

Just had technical job interview. Almost felt asleep...

The interviewer brought white board and took light blue pen that barely works, couldn’t see a shit what he was writing. Also, he couldn’t properly ask questions, so I had to ask to repeat several times. Got so tired from this shit...

Wait, what the...?

So, mid frontend developer is valued more than mid fullstack dev. But there’s also possibility that mid frontend dev could earn more than senior fullstack dev...

We should create privacy focussed and ads free internet protocol/network. It could be paid, and money would go to website owners (something like TV channels works?).

Of course, there’s a lot of gotchas, but for starters just an idea.

What do you think?

Client: I get 500 error, can you check?
Me: *investigating* php “reset” function on fail returns false instead of intuitive null.

And then there are devs asking what’s wrong with php...

Job posting on linkedin:
“The stack is react native, java/objective-c, golang and php. A True functional approach with adaptability...”.

Problem is that none of those are functional 🤦‍♂️

It was a long day... But I am going to sleep with a smile on my face :)

I was late with changes I needed to deploy yesterday, but because of the bug in vuejs app, it took me almost whole day just to fix it. But it’s ok I managed to finish it.

Also I got finally all parts delivered for my little electronics side project. So once I got home, I started working on it. Idea was to connect rgb led strip to raspberry pi.

I wired everything, turned on the power and only five led work, so for like 3 hours I was trying to figure out what was the issue. I rewired everything over and over, until I noticed arrows on the led strip. Turns out, I soldered wires on the wrong side (output), what a dumb mistake... So I moved wires to the other side, ran python sample program and voilà.

That was my first electronics project ever, I never soldered or done something similar and I must say I am really satisfied and not just of the result, but also how it actually helped me to clean my mind from all that work bullshit. I am definitely going to do more projects in the future.

But for now I am going to setup AI and make this led strip voice controllable.

Anyone here does use dartjs for basics as an alternative to javascript?

I hate js so much, that I am planning to give dartjs a try and in case I will like it, I would like to rewrite UI widgets in it (dropdowns, datepickers, modals, accordions, dropzones and other casual shit) to ease up my life in frontend and avoid using huge frameworks for that (like jquery or reactjs).

It also makes sense to adopt it for my current company, as we do a lot of mobile app dev with react native.

Anyway, it would be nice to hear experiences from other devs first.

airBaltic: hey, mister hacker, so these are characters our users can use for their password, we made everything to ensure the best hacking experience for you.

What’s the other fucking reason for doing it? Are they storing passwords in plain text, so it’s some weird kind of escaping technique?

Forbidding characters in passwords means only single thing for me, I can’t trust company’s competence of keeping my personal data.

Just during lunch time finished introduction course in electronics engineering. Must say that shit is fuckin complicated, just a hour of reading and it feels like my head gonna melt. So much units, concepts, constants, numbers... I am not sure if I will be able to learn all that.

Anyway, I have a side project idea that requires some electronics, so hopefully I can learn that much to build it and not shock myself during the process.

That moment when client thinks he found a bug, but that’s actually a feature he never asked for.

In my case: the feature was pre-filling user’s gender based on social security number, client thought it’s some random behavior.

I usually don’t write tests out of lazyness. But if I develop an rest api, I always write tests, because I am too lazy to use something like postman.

Back story tldr: our team had certification on using sitecore, because client asked...
More: https://devrant.com/rants/1827849/...

So we have completed training, it took 4.5hours. Must say, I expected no less of training from India, though respect points to mentor, surprisingly he had quite understandable accent.

Anyway, was working whole training on my side project, so just had quick glances on the screen what that guy was doing. But he just confirmed my opinion about sitecore - it’s a pile of shit. Then he tried to publish all the changes he made and (drums playing 🎶) after minute of loading - error (attached screen). Oh and he was keep mentioning how beautiful and awesome sitecore is 🤮.

After training last part was left: a questionnaire of 13 questions. To pass, at least 70% score is needed. Questions in docx, and answers supposed to be entered in excel file and then sent via email.

Ok, I open excel file on mac with numbers, I see 3 sheets:
1. Table with empty cells for answers
2. Table with correct answers
3. Scores that should be calculated after submitting.

Well, numbers (app) doesn’t support all excel features, so turns out sheet2 was supposed to be protected with password, and third one be hidden until answers are submitted. What a fail.

So yeah, I completed accreditation with 100% and don’t even remember a shit about sitecore.

Client asked our team to do accreditation for using sitecore cms. So I allowed my boss know:

1. I am a damn software engineer, not a fucking content administrator.

2. Even if accreditation was for technical part with dotnet, there is no fucking way I am gonna learn and use it, because I am hired and paid as php fullstack dev.

3. Every smart person on this world knows that that expensive pile of crap has no advantages over open source solutions (funny thing: heads of management in client’s company claim sitecore is going to be the platform of the future... what a joke...).

So, today we are having first training session, skype meeting with mentors from India (facepalm).

Also, we got credentials for sandbox sitecore environment, tried to login and navigate around a little bit, my browser crashed after a while.

Nightmare is coming up...

Will keep you updated guys after training.

One year ago, I was hired by digital agency company as backend dev. Also around same time company overtook the project from other company that used to do all backend work for them.

So, I was asked to get familiar with that project and, damn, that was the worst shit I have ever seen:

1. All php code was encrypted with ion cube. But after we asked, they sent decrypted version.

2. Of course, no versioning at all, nor migrations. Just a lot of production files.

3. Code was a fucking mess, half of it was dead, because half of the features were unfinished. And it also was slow as fuck, there were requests that took 15 seconds to load.

4. There was this piece of code, that contacted this company’s server and validated license. If it is not valid, website would return an error.

So, my decision was to rewrite the project from scratch. We have met client, explained everything, got confirmation. I started working on it 2 weeks ago. And my colleague was supporting that old system in production, fixing bugs or making small features. But also we haven’t modified anything that exists, because we were afraid to break something.

So today client is calling that production website is not working. I go to check the logs and guess what? There’s error saying that license has expired...

Had this with a junior:

J: Can you help me quickly?

M: Yeah, what’s up?

J: I don’t know how to make this thing work in twig (tpl engine, like jinja2)

M: hmm, you need to write if condition and it should work

J: yeah, but how do I do that in twig?

M: just write if condition in brackets, like you would in php

J: *writes: ‘{{ <?php if...’*

M: *screaming* No!!!
...

This guy, he freaked out, like literally jumped up and then had this look for the rest of the day, like he’s gonna kill me.

Don’t know if choices I have made were good or bad, but I don’t regret any of them:

1. After school I started looking for a job as a junior php dev. Received about 15 invitations for interview, half of them offered me a job afterwards. The one I chose taught me a lot about good coding practices, architectural design and writing efficient code in general. Just the stuff I focus on mostly. I will be grateful for the team whole my life.

2. Also after school, I got free place in university in computer science. It seemed like a waste of my time, so I had quit it to be able to focus on work full time.

3. About an year after, I applied and was accepted in quite good university abroad (AI subject). Must say I liked it, but was too lazy to study and I needed to freelance to survive and was quite hard to find a job without native language. Anyway, like a half year in I got a job offer from home country (someone recommended me) with quite good money, but with the condition that I quit university and come back home to work from office. I rejected it, because going back wasn’t an option for me.

4. Half year after, I had quit university, because it was getting more harder to freelance and study at the same time. Quite soon afterwards, I have got a job in a small start up of 10 people, where I still work today after one year. I love this job, I like my team and I get paid quite well (though could be more for my skills). The only problem is that I have no one to learn from, but to compensate that I am quite good self learner.

Don’t really know what I will do next, there are a lot of options in my head, so I will see. It actually feels a bit like a game of chess, there are so much possible moves, some are good and some are blunders but in the end you need to make a well thought good decision, so you can get closer to your final goal.

It happened about 3 years ago in my home country, some school teenager saw a problem with news industry and created solution for it using code.

He was pissed about news headings, that every of them are clickbaits almost having nothing in common with articles content. So he created browser extension that allow users change headings, see headings from other users and rate them.

That was great idea, just in a few weeks that extension became huge, everyone was talking about it and using it. Some smaller news portal even interviewed the author.

What happened next was fucked up. News portals started panicking, they started rolling their own solutions to block that extension, anyway, author updated it to bypass restrictions. Until threats about suing him started. Then he took it down.

This kid, he was doing nothing that would be considered illegal, but yet he gave up because of threats of people that have much more power and money than him, people that could fuck him up.

Why I share this, is because it kind of reminds me of today’s discussion about SJW. That everything is controlled by selfish people who have a privilege and power.

Me: I integrated translations UI into app, so now you can change texts yourself. But keep in mind that for changes to take effect, you need to press on big red button that says “Invalidate cache”.
Client: Wow! That’s so cool, but I think it doesn’t work, because when I change something, nothing happens.
Me: 😔

“PDF is evil” - Yusuke Shinyama (a.k.a euske on github, creator of pdfminer).

I spent countless hours trying to extract link actions from interactive pdf, dealing with all that pdf bullshit of endless instruction chains and pdf reference of 1000 pages. In php.

Thanks god, there exists some really great open source libraries like the one mentioned above that helps dealing with all that shit. So, my thanks to all open source contributors.

And fuck PDF.

Last year for company I work I made OAuth server + SSO discriminated by business unit in php. Well it was quite complex project and security sensitive, so I wrote tests for every piece of code. Then I made client for it with abstractions to be easily extendable, but was too lazy write tests for it.

Anyway, today needed to add new grant auth strategy. Thought, I could also write tests for the client this time. That was the mistake...

I installed codeception (testing framework), tested every class, and then left the main client class for the end where all http communication and other magic happens.

So turns out, I can’t capture function parameters with codeception (at least its not documented), so I can’t assert if data in the end is correct. I mean it’s fucking abstraction on top of phpunit, which can do that, so what the fuck? But ok I probably could just use phpunit, but anyway why the fuck you would create mock abstraction with only 20% of functionality from original implementation? It doesn’t make fucking sense...

In addition, I was testing code written with guzzle http (http client), and that is some pile of shit. Just why the fuck I need to write 20 lines of code just to get a fucking json response...

Fuck this shit, I am not going to test it anymore, it just makes me hate php, I barely can deal with all that angryness inside me.

Kotlin/native. Because it’s the only project that solves cross platform issue the right way and it supports all major platforms. Not like some messy solutions like electron or react native.

So I went on holiday for 2 weeks. Was partying a lot, met my old friends and I wasn’t coding at all, instead I learnt how to play chess, so I can keep my brain busy.

Anyway, towards the end of my holiday, I started missing coding and I knew I was ready return to work.

Monday: so we got feedback from client of website you created 1 month ago and these are changes you need to make:
1. Support IE
2. Update texts
3. Make CTA button bigger
4. Change color of ...
...

So yeah this shit again.

I have seriously started thinking about completely abandoning my career in full stack web dev, and go back end only, because that’s actually the thing I enjoy and not the fucking frontend bullshit of “I don’t like color of my penis, can you change it?”.

I also feel like this kind of work is waste of my skills, stuff like that can be done by any inexperienced intern, so why the fuck me?