Less screen time.

Stepping away to realize that maybe I'm part of the problem.

Talking to my manager about frustrations if they persist.

For me, it was when I was on a team doing government work. We had an entire team devoted to deployments etc which were handled via ansible.

Ansible was fairly new at the time (~2015, they had just been bought by RedHat) but the team was definitely doing a great job picking it up and creating install playbooks for _every_ piece of our distributed infrastructure (load balancers, application servers, queues, databases, everything).

I luckily left before stuff got too hairy, but last I heard they are more than 6 months behind schedule. They STILL can't get a reproducible install process with the ansible playbooks! And it's all due to tech debt ie not giving any time to fix things, so its just band aid after band aid.

It's really sad to hear because the sytem itself was pretty cool, completely horizontally scalable and definitely miles ahead of the program they've been using for the last 20 years.

Gonna be basic af here:
1) Let me use the latest version of my language of choice + libraries
2) Unlimited decent coffee (not starbucks but not folgers either)
3) A nice private office with a door so I can be uber productive if necessary.

The only proper way to end the evening...(11:30PM CST currently)

finally...a nice round number of ++, hopefully they use more than an unsigned 8 bit otherwise I'm gonna overflow after this post! :P

devRant stickers finally arrived! Another fine addition to this RedHatter's collection :)

>on laptop in kitchen
>music playing on workstation in office
>fiancee asks to turn it off

>ssh workstation -t 'sudo poweroff'

It's like 6ft away...

Code reviewing, came across this:

Double val = item.getPrice() * pointMultiplier;
String[] s = String.split(val.toString(), "\\.");
points = Integer.parseInt(s[0]);
if(Integer.parseInt(s[1]) > 0) { points++; }

Usually I'd leave it at that, but to add insult to injury this was a level 3 developer who had been there for four (4!!!!) years.

She argued with me that we shouldn't round up loyalty points if theres only 0.00001 in the calculation.
I argued that since it's a BigDecimal, we can set the rounding factor of it.
She didn't understand that solution, refused to hear it.

The code is probably still there.

Since fucking when did "bare metal" mean just running on an OS?? At a conference and literally everyone is like "we got kubernetes running on bare metal", got super excited for a bit because just the idea of that sounds amazing but they're using it as slang for "basically not in a container or vm."

Nothing exciting at all. Now we're patting ourselves on the back for getting software working without it being preconfigured as a container or a VM image. No one knows how to do anything any more. MUCH too much abstraction going on.

I guess it keeps me more employable, but the state of the world from a developer standpoint is just sad.

(For reference, this is what the first sentence of "Bare Metal" looks like on wikipedia "In computer science, bare machine (or bare metal) refers to a computer executing instructions directly on logic hardware without an intervening operating system.")

Honestly my worst career choice was due to the fact that I was severely dissatisfied with my life at the time, so I answered a recruiting email from LinkedIn.

The job sounded great on paper, the office was great, the interviewees were amazing, BUT at the end of the day it was so much less of a challenge than my current job that I was sick of it after 3 MONTHS (for reference, people who had worked there for 4 years and were seniors were asking me for help all the time at that point...on basic java problems...yeah..).

So my only advice when you get the itch to respond to a recruiter is definitely weight your options. Ask yourself "Am I really unhappy with my job, or is it something else?" because it can really save you a world of pain later on.

I got a different job thereafter, but it was sure embarrassing to run into my old boss at a party and he was like "how's the new gig" and I had already left...

Damn, looks like the garbage collector is using a new algorithm because it missed you.

Honestly I've had good luck, every single boss I've ever had has been great up until the most recent project manager (not people manager) at my latest consultant gig.

Guy was 60+, had the mindset that NOTHING can get done without a meeting, and that your ass in a seat is the most important metric of true productivity.

Coming from a mostly remote background with 50% travel, this was a huge pain in the neck to deal with for the last 2 months.

Luckily he's gone now (no one liked him...who would have thought).

Honestly couldn't batten it down, but it's probably somewhere around 3-4 hours. Did a few hacking competitions in college, and that's about the longest I can handle being fully productive. Nothing like a hackerrank from hell where the Perl interpreter didn't work (I know, Perl, yucky), so I was struggling to code in Python during the competition!

Working with a client...the resident """sysadmin""" hasn't actually been a sysadmin since the early 90s, the last OS he _actually_ managed was SunOS 5 or something. I can't remember what he said. He hasn't kept up AT ALL with modern technologies/terminologies. He's convinced SELinux is a security hardened kernel. We've explained to him several times that it's not but he sees Linux and thinks Linux 1.0 from the 90s. It's downright embarrassing.

Now this would all be well if I didn't have to interface with him often, but the client WILL NOT give me access to their systems. So I have to go through him to get anything done. Which is over webex. So I get to watch this guy type (and mess up) basic commands over and over (he isn't aware of tab completion of any of the bash features that are super useful). So I'm telling him what to type and the delay is always just enough for him to get too far in the command to back out, so its like SSH-over-incompetence with a 500ms ping. It's truly infuriating.

Every once in a while he'll get frustrated enough to hand me control of his webex session, which isn't as painful but once again the delay is bad enough it's still a pain.

Best part is that he looks EXACTLY like Milton from Office Space. So thats one plus to this whole situation!