a question for y'all:

just out of interest I would like to know:

are you *mainly* working on legacy stuff that is - without a question - just too old? everyone in your corp knows it needs rework but "EfFoRt JuSt ToO hiGh"? Where at the same time, most of dev time goes into maintenance and bug fixes instead of feature implementation.

If yes, do you fear that you're losing relevance on the market by not keeping up to date? What are your feelings about that situation?

did you maybe even quit a job in the past because of such situations?

---

Why do I want to know that?
- Had some beer
- As a freelance dude I often see battlefields right out of hell. I csn easily go, but the dudes working 9 to 5 on that??? Hoe can you oO

does somebody know of a tool to remove a green person-like cardboard cutout from an image?

it's a task that need needs to be performed for around 60k images :-|

asking for a friend

caution: just some dude sharing a random story.

started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.

next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.

seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.

we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.

you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.

this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.

we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅

just wanted to get this out of my head 😣

IMHO technical dept is kind of like smoking cigarettes for some decades.

You were told that shit will hit the fan but you do not take proper action. And one day you'll realize that you fucked up (or not, also seen that).

Worked for a company in IT, where we maintained an ERP which was "in progress" for over a decade. The basic implementation was done by people with zero technical understanding. To clarify: not self coded. Software was bought. We are talking about integrating the system.

Therefore, the foundation was like a wet noodle. When I joined that company, I told them that they need to address that. I told them that things will get slower and slower and that shit will hit the fan if no proper actions taken.
Even made a list with flaws I found. With potential risk and actions to take, that could then be measured.

At that time, five people worked in said department (including me).

People did not want to listen. "Would be too expensive to rewrite stuff".

Nothing has changed about the wet noodle, but I tried to fix as many things in a working system as I could. Felt like heart surgery, because changes got implemented and "tested" in prod. No version control, no documentation, everyone implemented things like they felt (no guidelines for consistency).
A lot of small fuckups that summed up over the years.

I left the company after two years because I had the chance to land a job as a dev.

Been around two years now since I left. Now 9 people work in that department with around the same efficiency as us 5 people back then.

The new employees struggle to be productive, because things are just implemented poorly and not maintainable anymore.

Had some dialogs with them some time ago. Everything I told them would happen, actually happened. What a suprise :-|
I will not go into too much detail about all the shit that's going on there, as it would be just too much (and my morning coffe is almost finished).

I think that we all know the difference between "not beautiful, but does the job" and "oh, that will backfire - badly". And I wish that my communication skills increase so that people start listening in future.

how am I even supposed to... ahh fuck it.

Found this gem and just wanted to leave it here :-|

May it be that .NET MAUI is supposed to be a Souls like title for developers?

Never experienced such pain creating even the simplest things :-|

Hey :)

what tools do you use to design your software architecture?

at the moment I am confronted with a mix of word, one note, draw.io, visio and balsamiq.

I have the feeling that this is a bit off because it's too many tools so I just wanted to ask.

this moment when you write something to sync a 5 figure amount of entities from somewhere and halfway through a wild "sql exception: binary data truncated" weirdo occures because you where too lazy to adjust column constraints properly :-|

!rant
tl;dr; quit my job last monday. going to grow my side hustle into full time freelancing.
I am so exited.

---
Story time:
I am working full time as a jack of all trades and also have a side business where I coach people on an ERP for doors/fenestration and also write custom software in c#.
I was able to manage both over ~4 years, with customer amount slowly growing (only doing B2B).

Last month I opened an account at a freelancer website just for the lulz and damn after a short amount of time the orders exploded. I had to shut it down again because I cannot manage the amount of work. But did manage to win a fair amount of customers that will keep me busy for the next year or two.

Spoke to my employer and told them about the situation (they know about my side business and it's all mentioned in the contracts). Said that I would need half the amount of hours with my business to reach the same amount of money and that working as an employee makes no sense for me in terms of money. I would however like to work 1 to 2 days in a week for them because working there is fun, even when its financially uninteresting.

they took one week to prepare a position and then invited me to a meeting. "we offer you 32 hours a week. if you want more, you have to make a descision. As a self employed person you have risk and we as an employer do not want to carry that risk for you and we do not want to finance your self employment" (etc.)

Thought I am in the wrong movie. I took that into the weekend and thought a lot about what has been said.

And last monday I invited to a follow up and told them

"sorry, I think I was not clear enough. Working for you is of no interest in terms of money. You do not finance me, it's the other way around. Sadly we do not come to an agreement, as 8 hours less does not fit the need. You said I need to make a descision. I do not want to do this but I'm quitting".

They responded with "Oh that is sad to hear. Is there anything that we can make so you do not leave?"

"Either pay me the same I would make as a self employed or follow my conditions"
Did not get a response on that.

I now have three months to prepare myself for self employment.
Currently working 40h + growing side business + getting the whole german bureaucracy shit together.

Tough time but hell this feels so damn good.

Just wanted to share this :)

Hey, i am an idiot when it comes to web development and i wanted to kindly ask a question.

I am developing a blazor wasm webapp and i want to give the user some kind of onboarding process. the kind where some parts of the ui are highlighted with explanation on what which button does or area of ui is for.

how do you call something like that? I just need something to google for.

Thank you for your invaluable time and again sorry for my stupidy

Being a dev you sometimes need to add some keywords to your google search :-|

wanted to set up a k3s cluster with my pi's. took me a fucking whole day to find useful ansible playbooks (which I needed to fix because outdated).
I want to habe metallb and nginx ingress running, so that differs from the default.
and now i spent the whole day trying to install a fucking pi hole and for some reason metallb does not fart out an external ip for the pi hole.

found several issues regarding this matter.

maaaan i am completely new to this whole clusterfuck and i feel a bit overwhelmed atm. i thought this would be easier. am i just an idiot?

My better half saying: "dinner is ready"

it happens too often that after I push something the next commit is something like "I am an idiot" 😑

!rant
I am on vacation from my full time job this week. I wanted to use this week to write a PoC for a potential customer of my side business. really interesting project for me.

potential customer is a window and door manufacturer and needs an application to manage their racks.

their ERP system already has a simple rack management but it is only useable in house.

they want the drivers to be able to scan racks they deliver to a customer with a native app and they want to have a webapp for the customers to see racks that are assigned to them as well as reporting a rack ready for collection. And that all needs to be in sync with their local ERP system.

as i am a .net guy i decided to go with the abp framework (because it got recommended to me) and xamarin for the native app part (because i have experience in this).

i have now spent 4 days implementing this and it has been so rewarding. the framework is so powerful and it's template saved me endless hours.

i even wrote a very basic connector service which synchronizes data between my app and the clients ERP system. Just one way until now because of time issue, but i learned to scaffold an ef core with db first. It is noticable that the ERP system is 2-tiered - meaning the clients directly talk to the db.

Tomorrow i will implement the xamarin client.

4 days just coding what i want to. choosi g my own velocity and making my own priorities without any interruptions or discussions and a bunch of new things to learn.

Probably wasted half a day because of stupidy (implemented some bugs) but fixing and learning is part of the journey and i lime that part, too.

i am so relaxed right now 😁 just wanted to share this without a real reason :P

implemented bidirectional calendar sync via caldav between my phone (google calendar), my pc (outlook) and my crm system (on my server somewhere in the clouds). my fiance is also receiving my appointments.

she just asked me why i cancelled valentines day, easter and basically every appointment which is meant to celebrate something.

seems like there is a bug. funny conversation though 😂

I wanted to play games today. simple mission. i was playing for two hours and somehow i ended up writing a webapp to help me with my taxes based on data from my firefly-iii server 🤔

why can't i sit down and just do nothing for a day 😅

from time to time i find it hard to organize my personal life. it appears that i forget stuff that does not seem important to me or just not interested in.
apart from my full time job i own a small business and try to maintain a more or less social life (as social as i can get with my dev background).

can you recommend any tools that you use to keep everything in line?

I avoided coding web apps for too long.

tried angular but I am such a retard that I just do not get it :/

started a project in blazor yesterday. still a lot of question marks but somehow I accomplished to finish something and feel this oddly exitement where I want to dive deeper 😁

This is a continuation of my previous rant about admob being not very informative when it comes to invalid traffic and the resulting restriction in ad delivery.

I then wanted to use admob mediation to hang in facebook ads. My app is written with Xamarin.Forms.

So first I needed to make some facebook configuration - create an account, let my app review, create some ad placements and other shit. I came to the point where I had to put in a link to my privacy policy and the link could not be accepted due to some SSL fuckup -.-'

I then found out that there is an issue with my SSL Chain. With the help of whatsmychaincert.com I solved that issue. Little side note here: I have limited knowledge of that stuff and my cousin helped me set up my homepage so I had no idea what I was doing. Did a snapshot and luckily I did not needed that as everything worked :)
This took me around half an hour just so I can paste the fucking link to activate my app in facebook developer portal.

After that I made the whole mediation configuration shit - not an issue as google documented this quite well but it took some time.

Now comes the shitty part. To use admob mediation you need adapters to the other ad network. I found a nuget package with exactly what I needed just to find out that it is outdated. So I pulled the repo and saw that this thing is an aar binding library. Never did that stuff so I read some docs again. Updated the package and consumed it in my app.

The google docs then said "Use this mediation test shit to check if you did everything correct before going prod" - aar binding nr. 2 (but I am now familiar with that :P). This thing then told me that facebook ads could not be loaded because the SDK version is outdated -.-' SDK version comes from another nuget package which is referenced by the first aar thingie. I tracked that thing back to a repo where I found out that they are indeed totally behind. So I downloaded the aar, made a binding lib and bound that to my first aar binding lib as that depends on this.

Put that all back in my app - tested mediation and fucking finally after 6 hours everything comes together! all lights are green and things work.

Sorry if this is not quite a rant but it was quite a journey and I just had to share it.

Damn Admob information delivery -.-
I got restricted ad delivery a second time in a month and they do not have a proper support...

I have an app which generates around 100k impressions a week and it kind of hurts when there is anything wrong with the ad implementation. it worked for over 2 years straight without any flaws.

after the last ban i even limited the amount of ad delivery by hardcoding a max amount per day. But the fucking lack of information makes it impossible for me to write fixes on my side -.- i do not even know which ad exactly is causing the invalid traffic - and admob is not really helpful when it comes to providing informations.

i totally get that admob wants to keep their algo a secret but for fucks sake how am i supposed to work with those ppl if they do not work with me?

I now need to stress around with binding alternative ad networks - wish me good luck writing adapters for xamarin...

Fuck Android 11 Scoped Storage -.-

People are fucking idiots.

Participated on the german hackathon #wevsvirushack

https://github.com/tntwist/...

43k people :P It was a huge mess but a great experience!

2 factor auth with carrier pigeon

updated my app and wrote "nobody reads this :/" into the changelog. did not thought that i was wrong :D

Every time i start a new project :'D

All i wanted was a toolbaritem which i can hide depending on a propery in my viewmodel (xamarin forms). that shithead does not have a damn IsVisible property so i had to make some custom shit for this. Result is that my page does not load anymore. no fucking error visible in output window.

could not resolve a bug in time as i have to pick up my girlfriend and do some social shit.

now i am on the road. all i can think of is getting back to my pc and fix this.

I got the job! prepare to call me junior dev 😁