I was hired to do a massive project as a temp. I got part way done and they hired me full time to finish. Then I moved to putting out production fires for unrelated systems until I left.

Don’t work under a lead dev that is single focused on immediate problem solving. You will only ever put out fires caused by their small-mindedness and miss on learning to solve bigger problems.

I made a functional parsing layer for an API that cleans http body json. The functions return insights about the received object and the result of the parse attempt. Then I wrote validation in the controller to determine if we will reject or accept. If we reject, parse and validation information is included on the error response so that the API consumer knows exactly why it was rejected. The code was super simple to read and maintain.

I demoed to the team and there was one hold out that couldn’t understand my decision to separate parse and validate. He decided to rewrite the two layers plus both the controller and service into one spaghetti layer. The team lead avoided conflict at all cost and told me that even though it was far worse code to “give him this”. We still struggle with the spaghetti code he wrote to this day.

When sugar-coating someone’s engineering inadequacies is more important than good engineering I think about quitting. He was literally the only one on the team that didn’t get it.

Suddenly your fingernails make it uncomfortable to use the keyboard. Developer problems.

I hate developers that don’t apply logic to non programming concepts. Like when someone declares what they don’t want instead of what they want. For my sake just say what you want to see.

I’m thinking of an animal. Guess what it it is not. Congrats you probably won.

I’m thinking of an animal. Guess what it is. Sorry you probably got it wrong.

If you feel that you need to make systems to enforce code standards... The team actually needs to learn to self-enforce your code standards. If an automated tool is determining standards it will be tricked into allowing clean-looking code with poor design choices into your project.

This chaps my ass.

HR made a day long inclusiveness meeting. About why there are so few women in the department. Basically the conclusion the HR rep was looking for was “toxic masculinity” and it was super uncomfortable.

The engineering teams couldn’t actually participate much because most of them worked on teams without any women and have absolutely nothing to do with hiring. The male engineers were trying to play along and give the right answers. We had to do flip charts and beak into teams and etc.

The HR kept singling out the same three women in engineering and telling the men to “shut up and listen to them”. The female engineers were like, “i don’t know. I don’t have much to say about it.” The HR rep continued to drill those three women to the point that it was uncomfortable.

The engineering hiring manager lost it before noon. He went to his desk and grabbed a stack of resumes. “You gave me a stack of 60 resumes. Looking at names only four applicants are female. Those applicants don’t have education or experience for engineering. If you want more female engineers in the office you have to put qualified applicants into the stack. Forcing these three engineers to talk in front of our department over and over and saying the men have to shut up is not making the workplace less toxic.” Then he told the three engineers, “This meeting is now optional for you three and you are welcome to do anything you want with your time.”

After lunch, all the female engineers went back to their desk and worked. The HR continued to shame the men in an angrier tone for the rest of the day telling everyone “how men can be” from personal experience because they were the ones now representing all women.

Eight bloody hours of that.

I was doing a demo and went to quickly launch PGAdmin from Start. I hit the Start key and typed "pgad" because that usually works as an application launcher for "PGAdmin". Cortana decided to ignore the program in the start menu and instead showed the audience info about about PGAD.

A whole room full of people now know about
PERSISTENT GENITAL AROUSAL DISORDER
Thanks Cortana.

Code is a highly detailed description of what a computer should do. If that description becomes inaccurate we will remove inaccurate parts. Take pride in writing good code, recognize that it was useful for a while, but don’t get attached to it. It will stay in the git history.

If you see code as your baby, know that the team might need to kill your baby.

Code quality is not related to your self-worth.

Be a dev; Output more than you input.

I HATE WINDOWS' WINDOW MANAGEMENT. I have two monitors and nothing can be maximized. Windows' spaces are terrible as well.
I am building in the back end in VS Code.
I have three terminals open because I need them to run multiple parts of the app locally.
I have postman open to try requests.
I have firefox for the orm system's documentation.
I have my database tool running as well.
I have an ERD diagram floating in a window.
I have another VS Code window showing a diff of my JSON compared to the version I'm replacing.
Also all of my team communication tools.

I have never hated shuffling windows around so much. Would it kill us to use some command line tools for http instead of Postman? Could we please get a decent shell in windows? Could we get some simple ways to switch between virtual desktops? Click click click. I can't automate clicking. Why do we use the most clicky tools we can find?

The forEach in JavaScript makes no sense. It looks like a map /filter/reduce but doesn’t actually return the array. Can you please loop like a normal language?

A mesh network specifically for children.

After falling down the Manjaro hole for months I yesterday decided to leave Manjaro for Pop!_OS. I lose a bit of performance and battery life, I gain a ton of UI polish, I gain a lot of package support, and I lose some hard earned nerd points.

My NAS has an easy to install Debian tool for file sync. I can use Etcher for making bootable USB/SD for my raspberry pi. Firefox is the default browser and I can use all my plugins and password manager out of the box. Apt is easier to use than pacman. Easier Python development setup. Docs are more often written for Debian. (For some reason I spent hours trying to get powerline and oh-my-zsh working right in manjaro’s xfce terminal before giving up.)

I’m bombarded with so many forms of possible entertainment and none of them bring any contentment. So much fighting about who is “putting effort into maintaining friendships” and etc. Is it normal to want to avoid people more than health authorities suggest during a pandemic?

Self documenting code is a fucking myth you bloody sheep.

Write “self documenting code” then add a fucking comment or two explaining why the fuck the code deserves should be there because nobody can see what the fuck it is doing or understands how the whole collection of microservices works. I’m sick of spaghetti code bullshit full of accidental redundancy because it is impossible for anyone to realize why something is there at a glance.

I renamed different “Contract” classes today by adding numbers before code review.
Contract
Contract1
Contract2
Contract3
All of these classes are supposed to be the same but somehow they aren’t and you self documenting dumbasses missed it. Don’t gripe about the numbered classes in the repo… fix the fucking code and collapse the classes so we don’t have four sections of code describing the same fucking structure from a http get with different interfaces because four people couldn’t read the whole like some fucking computer.

Code review today and the senior says "Avoid comments. Putting the procedure in a well named function where it can modify those class properties will work just as well."

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? YOU ARE GOING TO PREFER CODE OVERHEAD OVER COMMENTS? I AM SO TRIGGERED RIGHT NOW I CAN'T

I am currently blocked from doing my job by a firewall policy handed down from corporate that prevents WSL2 from connecting to the internet. Three days of no dev environment and counting.

We make linux software to be hosted on linux in linux containers in linux. We use linux command line tools to make it work.

"NO! WE ARE THE ALL-POWERFUL IT DEPARTMENT AND YOU MUST USE WINDOWS BECAUSE FUCK YOU THAT'S WHY."

Windows subsystem for Linux should be called “why are you bothering with Windows?”

FFS stop squashing commits. If “updated comments” is what the commit was it should show it in git blame. If “fixed null check” is what the commit was it should show it in git blame.

There is no reason to have “ticket-234 service revision” beside 1000 lines of code. How does anyone justify this loss of git info for the sake of “clean history”? Nobody looks at your history and says, “That is bloody clean git history I should write home about it.” People do however look at the code and say, “I wish I knew WTF they were trying to do on that line.”

New job with 100% remote work. They don’t have a laptop sent. I am paid to wait for a delivery.

I have a hand thrown ceramic mug, a scratchpad, and a kuru toga mechanical pencil. I keep a plant when my desk is large enough. Less is better for me.

I’m new here and am amazed at how awesome everyone is! Thanks for being you!

First month of project we suggest that we test that Entity Framework has made reasonable DB queries because the system will need to handle a lot of records. “Not a priority in this sprint because we need features.” Devs try to get it into every sprint. The last week of the project they want us to dump in a ton of records so they can test it. The N+1 SELECT query issue is on main queries. It is so bad and slow with more records that a simple query causes the container management to auto scale the application on a single query. They can have max 8 users in the system at a time and it will take 10 seconds to do a simple page refresh.

They get on our case and we dredge up all of the correspondence where they completely ignored our advice. Fix it now! We need another sprint. Fix it free! No.

I hate hate hate writing résumés for dev positions. Each posting requires that you guess wildly about their stack therefore write a totally new résumé. You don't get a job because you omitted the keyword "Newtonsoft" when mentioning your Dotnet Core experience. Hiring departments have one job and they universally suck at it for tech.

Were you afraid of the dark as a kid? Obviously you were afraid because you were a racist. Now go relearn all the words surrounding systems too complex for me to figure out you racist bastards.

Just be honest and transparent about who you are and what you can do. If you haven’t hidden anything you won’t feel like an imposter. You will be confident that you earned your reputation.

I was asked to integrate a piece of industrial software which was pre-alpha in a prod to align with corporate objectives. It would have caused all kinds of production problems and instability. Nobody would even notice that it wasn’t there. I procrastinated for eight months until version 1 was released.

I told my manager it was done. Then he informed me that it had been working the whole time and he got plenty of positive feedback so i should roll back to the old version until we can do a planned upgrade. I nodded in agreement and put off the downgrade.

I am insecure about using graphical user interfaces. E.g. IDEs, COTS systems, cloud tools, and ERPs. If I don't know what is happening inside the box I don't feel like I know what I'm doing.